Gator x mitch update again (FEAT WS)

Been making nice progress still! I worked on several shots of the last week+1 day since last post. I finally did the lip sync and character animation for the final two shots! That'll be attached below. (I added this part where he'll drink his own for a second... idk I thought that'd be hot, having her react with a subtle "woah..." kind of expression...

Also worked on the internal shot setup. Started out kind of... not so great. I was trying to go for some furry-logic based internal visual. But it wasn't looking right...

However a good friend of mine (RavenWorks!) recommended adding some separation between the womb and the tube part (sorry it's not very anatomically correct but hey, it's an alien gator babe who knows wtf their uterus and stuff would look like). I did some test renders and it looks pretty good I think! Her suggestion helped out immensely!

I also worked on the filling up part. Still not sure how I'll be handling this... but the idea will be having fluid come from the meat with hopefully enough to fill in the expanding space. It'll take some trial/error but I can make it work.

Also if you work on adult animation and use fluid sim you might have heard about Liquigen. It's supposed to be a faster, GPU-based fluid simulator and semi-recently it reached a 1.0 release. I tried awhile ago, a friend generously gave me an invite when they were doing some beta access thing and at the time it wasn't great for character driven fluid sim... another friend showed me some work another animator did in Liquigen and I was impressed so I gave it a try myself! You can find the website for it here (not sponsored/I didn't get a license to use it from them, I'm just using the 2 week trial for now):

https://jangafx.com/software/liquigen

I spent a day trying to import some alembic exports from the shot this from:

... It's still not good for character driven fluid sim. I'm not sure what the other artist's specs were or if they had the same problems I was having but Liquigen is super unstable for me. Alembics are very touchy. I tried to use the whole gator body for the sim but I couldn't even get that to process in Liquigen. So I cut off everthing but the head and breasts... and even that is very touchy and crashy. (AND keep in mind this is the unsubdivided mesh, when I do fluid sim with the FLIP add-on in Blender I use the fully subdivided meshes as obstacles because if you don't you might get some weird artifacts from the fluid mesh clipping into the rendered mesh because they surfaces don't line up perfectly. I'd imagine adding 4x more polygons to her obstacle mesh would not improve the crashing/instability problems).

You can't parent a fluid emitter to anything yet (as far as I know, there's no real documentation and all the answers to questions about this on the discord said it wasn't possible yet). Which is really sucks because it means you have to export your fluid object as an alembic...

As far as I know there's no way to make fluid emitters emit in a direction based on an empty/null's position... which sucks because it would make shots like this where he's waving his meat around a paint to animate the fluid, you'd have to keyframe the velocities yourself >_>

(btw this is a tangent but here's why exporting alembics is annoying- the shot I wanted to do is 1440 frames long. It takes awhile to export an alembic that long... so each time you change anything about the geometry of the characters or emitters you have to export the alembic again. And if you want to see the results of the fluid in your 3d software you have to export the fluid as an alembic from Liquigen which also takes awhile... and on top of that there's a chance either Blender or Liquigen will crash when exporting an alembic. And you can't just use a partial alembic, if your alembic crashes during export it's corrupted and not usable. So you get to frame 1400 and it crashes? Yeah it needs to export from the beginning again. I guess you could just export in smaller chunks but... as far as I know liquigen isn't designed for that kind of work flow, like idk if there's even a way to copy/paste keyframes from one project into another and have them start at whatever frame range you're working in in your alembic)

Also a missing feature that boggles my mind, you can't import a camera to view your sim from the angle of the camera your animation will be using (as far as I know, I saw an answer to question in august saying this wasn't possible yet). However, eventually I was able to start getting some nice looking fluid. That's a nice watery stream!

Their solver is fast but the annoying workflow to use it, how prone to crashing it is, how it's lacking basic (imo) features... I am going to still keep trying to work with it though, I think a short thing with 1 character and fluid that hits a stationary obstacle like a wall or something would be perfect to do some testing and exploration of the solver. Sooooo I might try to throwing together something to do some testing in Liquigen.

I've attached the shots I worked on and I also attached an updated animatic with the current WIPs of those shots!