"Future Spidrid Microdocumentary May Feature Silly Walks"

 Well, there's a headline for you. This post contains a quick update on the evolution of the intended 'microdocumentaries' about spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters. 

Why microdocumentaries? Because even animations of a few minutes take a long time to make if every frame is raytraced. Why spidrids and the other mentioned clades? Because seeing these animals move definitely adds value, compared to a diagram or a still image. There won't be hexapod microdocumentaries because my animation skills do not include such soft-bodied animal shapes. Not yet, anyway. 

The key elements of programming tetrapter movement are already there and I expanded the Matlab programmes that control cloakfish movement. I have almost completed work on programming spidrids, allowing visualisation of walking over uneven ground, separate movement of the abdomen and cephalothorax, slanted spidrid legs, and spidrid social signalling. I am considering having multiple spidrids walk about in a scene; that would be nice but is not essential.   

There was a very major snag along the way. I had intended to use Zbrush for 3D modelling, and had thought that I could use ZBrush, Sculptris, Photoshop or even Window's 3DPaint to paint body parts and produce texture maps. Unfortunately, Sculptris and 3DPaint no longer work well, maybe because Windows changed too much. Adobe abolished 3D painting in Photoshop because they now have a separate program for that. A glance at internet sources convinced me that ZBrush made texture exporting extremely complex, in true ZBrush style (for some reason the people at ZBrush keep clinging on to a horribly unfriendly user interface). What now? Well, with trepidation I turned to Blender, which had scared me off years ago because it was equally unfriendly. But the Blender user interface was said to have become friendlier now, so I downloaded Blender and selected the subjects of sculpting and texture painting for study. About 9 days later, I had modelled and painted all body parts of a new species of spidrid and had exported them successfully along with roughness and colour maps. I think that is telling, as I started with zero Blender knowledge. Mind you, Blender is still complex, because it does complex things; but there is a solid logic behind it.

 

So here is a try-out of a new spidrid species, produced with Matlab, Blender and Vue. There is a version with better resolution on my YouTube channel.  You may expect this species to feature in scenes of higher quality with sound, plants and more scenery.

 

 

And here is my rough starter species walking with a 'pronking' gait to impress potential mates. In this spidrid gait, two sets of four legs move together. It is an eight-legged version of the 'double tripod' gait used by insects, so I am calling it a 'double table' gait. In the pronking version, the body is held high and the legs are lifted much higher than needed. I think this walk is objectively silly, but you should ask the intended audience what they think of it, and that would be other spidrids, not me.       

By the way, I am trying my hand at Instagram too; you should be able to find me using 'J.Gert van Dijk'