Dragon mating update (Patreon)

I've been baking stuff in the background for this, including soft bodies and (for the characters and the pillows) which took me longer than it should have because of Blender's tendency to crash mid complex, longish soft body bake with multiple collision objects... but I finally got that done and I've been finally able to bake the final fluids for the external scene. I was quite happy with how it was turning out so I did some more tweaking, including setting up a way to have like, some nice string shapes around the base of the meat as the hole slides up.

This is a combination of two simple armatures (to control the mid/start/end of the ropes) and empties parented to vertices of the meshes (one for the start and end). The actual mesh is flat and I used solidify, subdivision and smooth modifiers to get a smoother shape.

I'm the process of baking the scene after the pull out- where the baby makin fluids are gushing from the dragon's hole and I didn't like how Jet ended up looking the end of the bake before the camera change... He's just too covered in fluid.

Since, in this case I have the luxury of having the camera change to something we don't seen in the previous seen, I can get away with some fluid trickery! I can do a completely new bake ~20 frames early to get the fluid from his meat shooting out and then on the frame the camera changes, spawn these fluids:

This is to give a nicer appearance of drips/ropes/splurts, looks a lot nicer than being coated in a sheet of fluid imo. I stumbled upon a simple but very effective trick to get some nice drips on surface by using a shrinkwrap modifier, a skin modifier and a subdivision surface modifier. I'm sure I'm not the first one to discover this though... but it comes in handy for making some non-animated fluid stuff!

No fancy geometry nodes here! I also used something similar to add some much needed decoration to the alien/bird environment, some y2k aesthetic inspired reflective pipes or something since this is supposed to be a locker room shower. More on that soon-ish as well but for now:

(excuse the missing alien [p]enis, this is before I attached the full detail one with the vein displacement to the mesh. And of course the missing fluids, it's a lot faster to work without the fluids in the scene!)