The spider started out as a simple extension of the aphid; eight legs instead of six. But during construction I discovered a couple of problems with the spider; the leg phasing and the number of joints.
The initial walking mode had two sets of four legs moving at 180 degrees phase with each other. The stomping walk that this produced looked very artificial so I experimented with using different phase patterns and observed the way real spiders would crawl around my bathroom. Eventually I settled on the current walking scheme which, though not perfect, looks as realistic as I could get it.
During my observation of spiders in my bathroom I noticed that they had two knees per leg and not just one. To model this I altered the bugleg macro to allow the calculation of two knee positions rather than the single knee that the aphid posessed.
