We recently had a client ask us if we've ever done a spider animation.  The answer was 'no'.  But we took a  crack at a proof of concept to demonstrate that we could.  And seeing how we've traditionally done very little character animation, we needed to prove to ourselves we could do it.  Here's a little behind the scene look at the process of animating, lighting, shading, and comping a CG Spider.

The work is done in Photoshop, Resolve, Modo, Mari, and Nuke.  We used Lens Baby 5.8mm to shoot 180º bracketed exposures (3 sets of 9, offset 120º) to create a LatLong image for IBL in Modo.  The plate was shot with the Balckmagic Ursa Mini Pro, in the new blackmagic Raw format, so the first pass of the grade was in Resolve.  The model was purchased form Turbo Squid, pre rigged; however, we did have to set up the IK ourselves (myself).  The first pass is a bit mechanical animation and low quality render (speed over quality), but all and all it looks pretty good.  We're currently working on an improved version just for fun.