Spider Web Rig: Free Spider Web Tool for Maya

Spider Web Rig: a free spider web animation tool for Maya

Spider Web Rig is a procedural spider web generator and animation rigging tool for Autodesk Maya. Quickly create detailed spider webs, customise their appearance, and bring them to life with animation controls. It is completely free.

Shoot a web from any point to any surface. The strand launches, hits, recoils and settles, and a real orb web grows where it lands, thread by thread. It follows the target if the target moves, rotates or deforms. Add a Web Rig and animate the web with controllers. Everything stays editable: change the look, the pattern or the material later and your animation is kept.

Key features

• 8 unique web looks: Classic, Realistic, Graphic Ink, Comic, Delicate, Elegant, Heavy and Swing Line. Each one sets the strand, the web pattern and the timing together.
• 5 material presets and custom colours: Natural Silk, Fresh Web, Old / Dusty, Dew-Covered with real water drops, and Glowing, in any colour. Arnold aiStandardSurface when Arnold is loaded, standard surface otherwise. No texture files.
• Surface Conform for realistic placement: the web settles onto rocks, curved and sloped walls, corners, and several surfaces at once.
• Web Rig Mode for animation: rim anchors, a centre controller and a main controller deform the web live. Keys, scrubbing, the Graph Editor, animation layers and save and reopen all work.
• Adjustable web density and strand properties: web size, thickness and speed relative to the look, with exact number fields.
• Clean, artist-friendly interface: Basic and Advanced views, plus Extreme Details for shot timing, web growth and impact.

How it works in Maya

1. Select where the web starts: a hand control, a locator, a joint, anything.
2. Shift-select where it hits: an object, a mesh, or a face or vertex for an exact spot.
3. Click SHOOT WEB, then REPLAY.

That makes it quick to block a web-slinging shot, dress a set with cobwebs, or animate a web that a character breaks through.

Spider-Man style web shots and web swings

The Swing Line look is made for web-slinging. Pick a hand control as the start and a rooftop, a wall or a lamp post as the target, and the strand shoots, hits, recoils and settles like a Spider-Man web shot. Block the web shots in a web-swing sequence, add web effects to a Spider-Verse style shot, or switch to Old / Dusty and dress a haunted set with cobwebs. The same tool covers an animated spider web for a creature shot, a comic panel in Graphic Ink, or a dew-covered web at dawn.

Spider-Man is a trademark of Marvel. Spider Web Rig is not affiliated with or endorsed by Marvel.

Compatibility

Autodesk Maya 2022 to 2027. The download has two builds: one for Maya 2022 to 2024 and one for Maya 2025 to 2027. To install, unzip it and drag install.py into the Maya viewport.

Spider Web Rig by Levent Ulas. Explore more Maya tools by Levent Ulas, or browse every animation plugin on Animworks.