Alien x Bird update, hair physics finally (Patreon)

Got the hair working fine on the bird. The biggest problem with this was the size of the file I was working in. Once you go over ~3 gigs for a file in Blender in my experience, everything takes like 20-40 seconds to do (like undoing, saving, adjusting the frame range, can't imagine how slow this would be on a HDD)... so I just appended the characters only into a separate file to bake the hair.

You might be thinking "Velocirection, didn't you post about the bird hair months ago? Why was it a problem?" and you're correct, I did. But for some reason the physics bone stuff got messed up on the hair at some point and I couldn't figure out what was going on with it... I'm using the bone dynamics add-on:

https://blendermarket.com/products/bonedynamics

(not sponsored!)

And it's cool add-on but sometimes it does some weird stuff, like the settings in the panel get unlinked or something from the physics objects' settings. And it took me awhile to figure out that's what was going on. Manually setting parameters and the bake frame range works which is what I ended up doing.

I also toyed with the idea of giving the bird a different, less unique hair style thing but I feel like it's such an important part of the character's design that changing it would be a big mistake.

Overall I was dreading this hair problem because I was stupid and made some crazy hair that's kind of pain to deal with and trying to do it in the larger original file was awful, but once I got everything in a clean file and everything was a lot more responsive/quicker in Blender, I was able to get it looking good. It took some trial/error with baking between different cameras (because I animated the characters popping into place when a camera changes to make the shot look good, but physics sims don't like that so it makes things freak out)

Additionally, finished and exported the c[u]m last week but didn't post about it. That also turned out pretty good I think! (the hair doesn't move hair because this was *before* I was trying to get the hair looking right)

(and ignore the weird green splashy mesh thing, I forgot to hide that viewport rendering, it's a fluid object that helped with the aliens liquids)

I did a bit of trickery to get sneak some fluids on the alien's face before the camera pans up to his head.

The most painful thing about this animation is the sheer size of the fluid data. Total, all the alembics take up ~61 gigs... like I can't even have half the alembics present in the same Blend file because the file gets too big to fit in RAM! For some reason, importing an alembic into a Blender scene increases the file size even though the alembic isn't present in the file data, it just points to the file itself.

Which isn't a huge deal since I can just split things across different shots but I was kind of wanting this to all be in the same file. I just kind of wish alembics didn't increase the file size since. As far as I can tell, it's just getting the data each frame from where the file is at so... no idea why importing alembics into a scene would increase file size.

Anyway, there's a few more details that I need to get to before starting to render (like finalizing the veins on the junk, finishing off the environment finally, some pre-viz stuff like making sure the motion blur is working on all the alembics) but one of my biggest worries is taken care of (the hair physics). I have no idea what the hair will look like with the fluid, like how much it'll clip into it for the scenes where the aliens liquids splash on the bird (since I removed the hair and tail from the bird's obstacle mesh when baking so fluid won't react to the hair) but I'm hoping it'll look fine. It should (hopefully)

I attached the viewport render with the hair/tail bakes (I haven't moved the sound into the new file so there's no sound) also the soft bodies are wonky in some parts, need to rebake some of that and mess with their influence between camera changes. I also attached the earlier viewport render with the c[u]m. Once I figure out how I'll be splitting up the scenes, I'll do the final viewport test with everything final present.

Really apologizing for the slowness on this... I would have had this done earlier, but I was thinking "I should get the dragon mating animation ready for it's final fluid bake so I can have that going while working on the final touches for the alien/bird animation" which involved baking the soft bodies for both dragons (so the fluid sim would respect the jiggle) but that was another challenge because blender kept quitting mid soft body bake... but I eventually got that sorted out and currently starting the fluid bake for that (I'll post more about that soon!)

I gotta be honest here, dynamics are such a pain in Blender. It's not bad when you're baking over short frame ranges or you don't have any collision objects but once you start doing long frame ranges and adding in multiple collision objects it gets slow and possibly crashy *fast.* Idk how other software packages work so maybe this is par for the course but it can be a real pain. But worth it in the end, to make hair things bounce or butts jiggle.