AshleyEM/slither-addon

🐍 Animation addon for Blender that makes an armature slither.

🐍 Slither | Animation addon for Blender

Easy way to make an armature slither. Quickly animate snakes, tentacles, fish, lizard tails, or your sleep paralysis demon. No complex rigging necessary.

⬇️ Download Slither Addon

Install
Use
Features
Limitations

Install

1. Download the addon (above)
2. In Blender, go to Edit > Preferences
3. Click Add-ons > Install
4. Select the slither.zip you downloaded
5. Check Animation: Slither in the window to enable it
6. Go to 3D View > Side Bar > Slither Addon (or press N)

Use

1. In Pose Mode, select the bones you want to slither (you can skip bones)
2. Adjust values in the Slither Addon panel
3. Click Apply

Your armature should be a connected chain of bones, with or without an IK handle. More bones = tighter slithering.

Features

• Axis: animate across the X, Y, or Z axis
• Amplitude: how extreme the slither is
• Flexibility: stiff (dinosaur tail) or loose (tentacle)
• Head or tail: start slither from head or tail
• Speed: keyframe spacing
• Duration: how long the animation is

Animate a full snake body

The head/tail animations are separate. To animate a full snake body, create a half-head-half-tail rig and apply the head/tail animations separately. You may have to move and scale the keyframes so that the head/tail animations synch up.

🥀 Limitations

• Head/tail animations are separate due to the head-tail nature of Blender bones
• Can only animate along 1 axis at a time
• Animation speed is scaled by the number of bones, not constant

For the eggheads

The math behind this is just a repeating sine wave function tamed into submission:

Amplitude * Nth bone * sin(Angle +/- (Nth bone * Flexibility))

• Angle increases indefinately
  
• Amplitude affects how extreme the slither arc is
• Nth bone staggers the bone arc amount from head to tail
  
• + for head movement, - for tail movement
  
• Flexibility makes bones at the tip arc more severely than root bones