***These models & rigs were created in Blender 2.8 using Eevee***

01 Unzip the downloaded files and Append the Collection for the male or the female or both if you purchase both. 

02 You can properly scale the entire rig to fit any scenes by setting the armature to object mode and selecting both the model and the rig object. Scale to the needed scale, then select the armature and put in pose mode and animate away.

03 You can alternatively scale the rig by the globalRoot which I don’t recommend for big scale changes because it also affects the fur scale and overall proportions. Slighting is however fine for variations of spiders of the same sex and specie.

04 You can affect all legs at once using the legsRoot, you can move, rotate and scale to quickly pose.

05 You can alternatively use each legs target to pose the leg and same for the tarsus target (little hands in front of mandibles (mouth)).

06 Extra leg controls can be found by making the bottom first armature rig layer. Those controls allows to bend and twist the legs (rarely really needed, but there in case it is needed).

07 To make the mouth move simply rotate the mandible bone called fengs. If you want to also control over the maxilas and labium part of the mouth, they are also on the first bottom layer of the armature rig.

08 The body bone controls the body rotation and location.

09 The abdomen bone control the rotation and part of the location of the abdomen. On the female it also scales to mimic eggs building.

10 The abdomen flaps (only on the male) only open on local X rotation and have restrictions in rotation to make it super fast to pose.

11 The spinnerets bone can only move in and out and can scale on two axis and allows to squash and stretch as well as open the spinnerets (where the spider silk would generally come out).

If you want to create a spider silk thread like I did in my short movie, its fairly simple. I used a row of lean polygons with enough length divisions. I added some hooks on each end groups of vertices. I then parented the hooks where I needed each ends and add a vertex group for those hooked vertex so they can be used as pins for cloth. Made sure to add collision to the objects I wanted the thread to collide with. Then I added cloth dynamics, played a bit with the stiffness settings until I got the desired result, applied semi shiny/transparent material and voila.

That covers it all! Very simple and effective rigs, super easy and fun to animate.