Raptor pre scene

Happy late thanks giving if you celebrate that!

I've been working on this bit, doing some animation, cloth sim testing, testing fluids- I'll start with the fluids. I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned this in a previous post but I did some R'n'D on a method using geometry nodes to merge verts by distance.

This solves the problem of making it so a drop or a string can be slung off, detaching from a mesh and flying somewhere else, in a way that can use motion blur (which immensely helps sell the look of clear fluid). Only problem is that I don't know how to delete faces in geometry nodes so merged faces need to be manually key'd on/off with a mask modifier which is a bit annoying. But it could work though, maybe.

I was thinking I could rig a mesh that I could manually animate or use physics of some kind to animate it, using physics and manual animation to make it work. Like I made a string mesh, rigged it with some bones, baked some empty's to the position of the head, constrained the bones to move with the empties and offset the empties to give a trailing effect.

It kinda works, maybe I could figure out a way to make it work with some more tests, maybe in another animation I'll do some experimenting with the geometry node/rigged mesh approach. I think there's potential for it. Instead I decided to go with real fluids this time, you just can't beat the results real fluid sims can give.

Like the whole reason I thought about trying to use a mesh for the pre on this shot is to avoid long bake times. The domain needs to be high resolution to have thin strands of fluid and there needs to be a healthy amount of surface tension to make the fluid sticky (because you have to remember in the simulated fluid world, viscosity isn't enough to create sticky fluid, it needs surface tension!)

Usually I use a lower amount of surface tension, maybe a lower accuracy too but it needs to be higher in both the amount and accuracy to actually behave like pre. So... the bake times for the tests are pretty long. I'm not looking forward to the time the final bake will need but the result should be worth it.

Here, I thought it'd be fun to have a part where he flexes and it comes out in a basically constant stream:

The animation on the character is still wip, needs some polish and stuff. And at some points you can tell that there's only 1 physics bone on the meat with the harsher bend, that'll be fixed later when I finalize the body movement, it's one of those things that needs to be done last because it depends on how the rest of the body moves.

I really want to finish this sequence and render it out- I think it'll be a hot one, seeing a large floppy dong getting hard, leaking like a faucet, combined with some moody lighting...

I want it to be like, it's in the middle of the night, the hallway is dark, the only light would be what's coming through the cracks of the door so we get this feeling of voyeur-y vibe.

Really happy with how the material on the shorts turned out though- I tried my best to make a shiny polyester athletic shorts material and it looks like... pretty evocative of shiny polyester?

(also imagine he's wearing a shirt in these test renders)

So yeah, cloth sim for the raptor's parts, it's not a joy to deal with- in one of the above gifs, you'll notice his right hand (or left since the renders will be flipped) is on his stomach. I thought it'd be cool if started to feel his tummy under his shirt as he gets hard. I did a bunch of testing to make it kinda work but it's quite annoying because cloth sim on characters is annoying in general so I figured he just keeps his hand on his hip for that part.

I figured I'm just going to keep the cloth sim simple, no hand reaching under the shirt. Here's some testing with the another short where he starts slowly stroking:

I did some experimenting with timing and I think that having him stroke in the same rhythm as the parasaur's toy would be cool for the part that shows him stroking-

I've attached the animatic of the cinematic version below with viewport stuff for most of the additional shots.