Various testing of things (Patreon)

The past couple days (and a bit last of last week) I've been testing a few things and exploring some ideas for possible "plan b" animations in case it starts looking like I can't get something done this month.

I should be getting some of the triceratops' dialogue in soon-ish, but it I'm not sure how long the glamor hole animation will take to complete as it's looking like it'll be a long one! Which is why I'm taking a bit of time to test a few things. The first is how doable a shower scene would be- the main hurdle to overcome was making a decent looking shower effect.

I was able to do that! It's a bunch of particle systems, one per hole on the shower head, that emits a long sphere with glassy material.

On it's own, this looks not very good. The magic happens when using motion blur:

Now the particles look a lot more like fluid being sprayed from a bunch of holes on a shower head. I've attached an animation of it in motion. Motion blur only shows up when rendering animations, so it'll look terrible when doing viewport renders. But the final result will look pretty decent.

I made some improvements to the small raptor's head as well.

I change a bit of the eye shape, redid the eye brow topology completely as well as around the neck and fixed some of the lower lips.

This is before:

And after:

This is something I was meaning to do for awhile- I kind of rushed his head... so being able to fix that is pretty nice.

I also fixed changed a few things about the brontosaurs' face/rig, but they're not as visible. I did a quick lip sync test with some lines I was recorded for my shower idea (in the attachments) to make sure my changes to the face were still good for lip-sync.

For the shower animation, I was really feeling like some [p]i[ss]ing would be neat, and like if the small raptor dino was into it and the bronto was indulging him in his kink.

One other idea I was thinking about is a solo video with the bronto, of a practice session where he's honing his neck and insides to eat his small friends with his mouth. He would be deeply sucking on a double ended toy, then he would swallow the whole thing. He would talk about how deep it is inside of him. The camera person would move around back, and we'd see him push/pull the toy in and out of his butt. That part would be trivial to do at this point, but the swallowing part is going to be much more of a challenge to do.

This is still pretty early on, pretty rough, more research and development than pretty. I added an IK setup for the neck. It's not great, and to make it work better, I think I need to change a lot of the mesh around the back of the head, or even start the neck part of the armature over from scratch...

I didn't want to have to mess around a lot with animating the toy, so I've been looking at ways to make it easier. I tried a bunch of different ideas to make the toy curve with the neck and not cause any clipping problems, and I think I'm onto something.

To make the toy curve with the neck, I thought using a curve path and having the bones follow it some how would work but it's really not an idea solution for when you want something to stay in the same place and move with a curve. Finally, I used by best friend... the shrink wrap constraint on a proxy mesh that moves with the neck and head.

The toy's rig uses stretch to constraints, so it can get stretchy when pushed to extremes as you can see, but that's not going to be a problem because it wouldn't end up doing that kind of stretching.

To avoid clipping, I used another mesh on that moves with the head and a boolean modifier. This way, there's no worrying about if there will be small clipping through the neck.

One final thing, to make the neck bulge a bit when the toy moves near it, I have used a displace modifier and vertex proximity:

The displace modifier has no texture on it, so it just expands the geometry based on a vertex group (that's the result of the vertex proximity, the closer the toy mesh is to the bronto's neck, the more the displacement bulges it).

So honestly, I like this idea a lot, but idk how well I can pull it off. But overall, I'd do something with the bronto for my backup plan since I do the voice for him :p

Oh also the bronoto now has good 4skin:

Beautiful, candy car paint.