Alien x bird fluids update (Patreon)

The final WS fluid bake for this thing has been probably the most frustrating one I've done up to this point (like, ever). It's a whopping 31 gigs of simulation data (and also this one is special because I used the color mix feature so that the shaders can mix together)

I spent the last few days trying to bake it all to alembics and Blender (or maybe it's my own hardware?) has a hard time with exporting large fluid sims to alembics. So I've been exporting them anywhere between 3 and 10 frames at a time which has been really annoying because the file itself takes awhile to load and doing almost anything ends up in ~20 seconds of waiting.

It's all exported to an alembic but what's incredibly, very frustrating is the mix color attribute doesn't get exported... so I backed up the FLIP add-on cache and also made a separate file that has only the final p[e]eing bake. I might end up just using the bake from the FLIP cache but that can be buggy so I might have to render a mask of the fluid colors and see if I can maybe use camera projection to mask two materials... maybe. Possibly.

I did test renders of each tiny alembic (to make sure the motion blur was working) and saved a couple because they look kind of cool.

I think this is too ambitious of a fluid sim (for me anyway) and if I had known that it would take this long to bake and get into alembics, I would have made the domain much smaller. Interestingly the actual bake only took about 23 hours (which is long I've done fluid bakes that have taken like, 70 hours...) but there's so much geometry per frame it's a huge pain to deal with.

I do hope it'll be worth it in the end. 

I've attached the viewport renders with the final fluids (minus the money shot, working on that). The alien's body flashes a bit (due to z-fighting) so a bit of a warning if you're sensitive to flashing (it's like what's in the gif in the header but I think the gif isn't as bad since it's a bit lower frame rate, like I don't think it's extreme but just in case anyone might have a problem with it!)

I've been working on other stuff as well, I'll post about that after this in a bit! (Including some of the raptor/parasaur)