Deep dish update- fluid RnD, pig (Patreon)

I finally have the character animation, dynamics and stuff fixed enough to where I can start fluids for the rimming stuff. This time I really want to try achieving better drips- sometimes they happen in a sim, sometimes they don't but I want to be able to have more control over what fluid drips into a string.

I had an idea- what if I use cloth sim to give a line of vertices motion, hook the vertices of a nurbs path to the verts of the simulated mesh and use the nurbs path as a curve guide force field in FLIP fluids? The trick is having a force field that attracts fluid to the surface above along with the curve guide that will attract the fluid in a line. As the fluid accumulates on the strong force field near the obstacle, it will drip down the curve guide because it's attracting it towards that line.

And with a basic cloth sim with default settings, it ends up as a nice stringy drip.

This is still pretty experimental but I think this might be a good approach for more controlled viscous fluid dripping.

You could have dripping fluid like this probably with enough surface tension but surface tension really cranks up the sim time a ton- the steps per frame required increases as you add more resolution to the domain (and increase even more with higher surface tension values) and I'm trying to avoid that... You still need some surface tension for this (so the liquid will stay kind of stringy as it leave the curve guide) but it should be able to be kept low.

I've also been working on improving the rigify version of the pig for use in the next shots. Nothing too crazy since it's the same visually (besides a fake eye shine dot I've been adding) but the controls are much more organized. In Blender 4.1, they added nested collections to bone collections and easier solo layer viewing so I've taken advantage of this new feature:

Nested bone collections are awesome- the Blender developers did a good job!

Also you can add modifiers to the modifier stack of a linked object- here's a quick test with the pig and Taylor exploring this possibility. The finger lattices from his rig are affecting the pig's mesh:

(Ignore the floating tongue- haven't attached the tongue to the rig, it got messed up when cleaning things up for the pig's .blend)

(This pairing isn't canon but might be fun to do sometime down the road...!)

So yeah, a linked library work flow is pretty kick @ss. Linking characters is so much better than appending them in and using a local copy- if I need to add a cool feature to a character for a specific shot, I can add it to the master version of the file so it can be used again later easily.

And the last thing in this update, I've written a rigging utility for connecting external rigs to other rigs. I prefer to have the teeth and tongue as separate meshes armatures that are controlled by the main rig but it's a bit of a drag to do it manually.

It copies bones from a rig to another and then adds copy transform constraints to the bones in the rig the bones were copied from.

Here's a video showing it in action:

https://youtu.be/BM-P1ZextSM?si=4-kHI6cTeWPcIc62

I made it mainly for tongues and teeth but you could use it for clothing (so the main rig can control clothes that are rigged separately). Or pretty much anything else. Heck, you could make your character out of many different rigs and use this utility to add bones to a main rig that the target will copy the transforms of. I've attached it but be warned (as usual with my add-ons) save before doing anything with the add-on incase it messes something up! It works well for me so far but I've barely used it.