Idea I spontaneously felt compelled to do (it's a weird one though)

So I was thinking about lactation as one often does and I thought it'd be cool if Nyro's species had some kind of thing where during certain parts of the year they lactate. And it's possible for them to use their appendage to suckle their breasts and then drink their milk from the appendage. I think it'd be really hot, using your prehensile reproductive appendage to suck on your lactating nips, then drinking the milk from your appendage... idk

It started out as something I thought would be simple but required a bit more R'n'D than I anticipated. I added a bunch of extra functionality to the rig (so the nips/breasts could be more receptive to being sucked on and the appendage had more controls for its "lips" and also easier ways to inflate parts of it to give the impression it's holding liquid)

I did some test animations to see what it should look like/if the rig worked for this purpose. I feel like this would involve some pelvic muscles you know? So I wanted to have that animated (though in the animation it probably won't be seen) And also it's important to show fluid being added to the bulb part of the appendage.

I did this with something different than I usually do- lattices weren't giving me the shape I wanted so I tried the cast modifier. If you use an empty you can control it's size/shape with a bone. Perfect if you need a smooth, sphere-like shape.

Here's another test with the nipple/breast controls:

This is a wip bit for the actual animation (needs work!!)

I was going to make a post about this days ago but I thought it'd be disappointing if there wasn't anything too nicely animated to show... so I tried to have the first shot of this animated and done (without fluid, just imagine light blue viscous pre-like fluid here)

In the second shot, we see the appendage suckle action (that's still wip but I'm hoping to have that done/polished asap). This was a challenging thing to animate but something I thought would be pretty hot- the bulb filled with breast milk, draining into the mouth, then it slides into the mouth, drains quickly, the cheeks fill up, some nice swallowing...

I've included two videos- one is the first shot and the other is the bulb swallowing thing above (but the full action of it)

One other thing I did was I wrote a tool that's a faux kind of "scene selector" that works with animation layers. Basically you can add/remove "scenes," define their start/end frames and  their ID. I name my layers with little pipes between important things so I can know what they are (like |L-#| means it's a loop and the number is how many frames it is. |R| is a layer with replace as the blend mode. |A| is an adjustment layer with additive blending). I figure I could add a little scene tag to the layer name and an add-on could iterate through all objects with animation layers and show/unlock all layers with a match scene ID.

So basically you can click "set" for the one labeled "leak" and any layer with a |S1| tag would be shown and unlocked. All other layers would be hidden and locked from editing. This is another tool that's probably not too useful to anyone else but feel free to use it. It's not like... thoroughly tested but it works pretty well for this animation.

I apologize for this weird, self-indulgent thing... but like, I couldn't stop thinking about and I had to do something to get it out in the world.

Also I was thinking about something involving a 3 gallon bucket but that's something for another time possibly...