Free Blender Tool For Procedural Spider Walks
You move the body, and the add-on automatically figures out how the legs should step.
3D Artist Roman "iltaen" Gibadullin, known for his various low-poly 3D projects, has released a free add-on for Blender 5.2 LTS that procedurally animates the legs of multi-legged, spider-like rigs in real-time.
The system raycasts each leg toward the ground, placing steps sequentially as the character moves. It also anticipates the direction of travel, allowing the legs to plant ahead of the body rather than simply dragging behind it. Once the motion looks right, a built-in bake operator can convert the live simulation into a regular keyframed Action for further editing.
To use the add-on, you'll need an armature with a body/root bone and independently poseable leg controller bones that aren't parented to the body bone, and a collection of mesh objects for the feet to walk across. It could probably work with biped or quadruped rigs as well, since Spider Walker essentially calculates the position for each foot's next step.
"Each frame, the add-on:
- Reads the Center Bone's current world-space position and estimates the body's velocity;
- For each leg (one leg per gait step, in list order), compares the leg's current planted position to a predicted target – the leg's rest position relative to the body, shifted forward in the body's direction of travel based on its speed;
- If the leg has drifted far enough from that target, it raycasts down from the predicted target onto the Surface Collision collection to find a landing point, and starts a step: the foot lifts, arcs to the new target, and plants;
- Legs step one at a time in list order, so the gait doesn't look like every leg moving in unison."
The creator discloses that parts of the code were developed and refactored with AI assistance. Feel free to share your feedback and download Spider Walker to give it a try here.
If you're interested in diving deeper into procedural animation for multi-legged creatures, we've got plenty of tutorials on our site to help you get started. Watch this video by Slava Baravik, the creator of the Smart Layer script, or check out this one by Muhammad Kashif Ali. Alternatively, you can explore Lincoln Margison's tutorial:
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