Addon’s page: https://blendermarket.com/products/spyderfy-bug-system-add-on
Spyderfy is a new and powerful insect simulation Blender addon that allows you to create amazing simulations of a crowd of insect animations in a short period of time. As a Blender artist you can do this easily, and with a high degree of control using many settings and controls that allow you to get the result that you are looking for.
How can this insect simulation Blender addon be an asset?
This Spyderfy Blender addon is a great tool for adding unique bug effects ! It can be especially handy when working on VFX shots and animation shots where there is a need to create moving insects. Whether it be flying ones such as “flying locust”, crawling ones such as spiders in the background or even close up shots. Because the insect assets are well designed and they are well textured, they look great in both cycles and Eevee. There are also other assets in addition to other ones that might be appended in future releases.
The addon comes with different assets and intuitive user interface menu. It provides the ability to add various creature boid particle systems with animated 3D assets attached! This will save you a lot of time and effort if you are planning on including bugs or insects in your shots.
To start using the Spyderfy Blender addon you just need to go through 4 simple steps:
- First, you need to check the boxes for the bugs you want to be included in your Boids system. This is will allows you to choose the proper bug or insect that is going to be generated in the scene.
- Name your Boids system, this is very important to remember because if you don’t, it will most likely give you an error message which can be a problem if you don’t realize where it is coming from.
- Choose whether you want the bugs to have a goal to follow, this comes in handy when you have a reel target that you need to create CGI bugs for.
- Add the bug system to your scene. Also, you need to make sure that you have selected geometry in your scene for collisions whether it be a simple plane, a table, a wall, or whatever.
When you play the animation, you will see the bugs crawling and moving around on the surface, usually towards the goal.
Additional (and fantastic!) features of the Spyderfy Blender addon
Some of the things you can do include changing the size of the emitter which will allow you to distribute the generated bugs differently across the surface. In addition to that, you can move the goal around to see the bugs moving accordingly to follow it. Especially since it’s an insect simulation Blender addon in the first place: having this feature enhances its usage for VFX purposes.
After the Boids system is added you can dial in more specific settings and bake the system movement within the particle system panel built into Blender!
From the settings of the addon, you can control many things. For example: from the Boid Brain settings you can prioritize few things including the goal, Flock or the ability separate the bugs. As a result, you will see the insect’s movement and behavior change according to that.
And in order to see the effect taking place, you need to rebake the cash. Which will not take more than few seconds depending on the number of bugs and the power of your machine.
You can also do other stuff including the size and the randomness of distribution and size of the bugs across the surface. Besides, from the movement Tab, you can decide how fast the bags are, their max speed, acceleration in addition to many other settings you can control. I believe that once you try it, you’ll agree with me on the fact that it’s an amazing insect simulation Blender addon.
Addon’s page: https://blendermarket.com/products/spyderfy-bug-system-add-on
