Dragons mating lil update (Patreon)

While rendering the alien/bird thing I was polishing up the internal shots for the dragon thing. I ditched the softbody sim on the internals because... eh, it just didn't look great imo so just added a couple more controls to the internals rig and hand animated some extra squish on the shaft and more pull/wiggle on the insides.

I wanted to see how this was coming along so I focused on the look of this and how much fluid there should be in each shot (since there's three individual cuts to the internal animation)

First, I was having a hard time making everything look sufficiently lubed up and slick. The first problem was the shaft wasn't looking lubed up enough but that was a simple fix. I've done this before, using a "lube coat" mesh that has displacement on it (and the displacement's vertex group is based on a vertex weight proximity modifier with the internals mesh as the target, such that the displacement is strong farther away from faces and weaker when closer to faces.

The lube coat is just a glass shader with ambient occlusion (and uses some ray depth) to determine how transparent it is (so that it's more transparent where it intersects with stuff and the ray depth is so that there's no extremely dark shadows on the "glass")

This ends up looking pretty good, a lot better than I thought! You can see it in that gif in the header, the lube coat actually looks a lot like a thick lube coat (which is like, just tons of pre because Jet is a seminal fluid machine)

The other problem was the light source was a regular old point light which gives these weird specular lights which look fine most of the time but in some cases the specular size is way too big for the amount of light being given off.

In order to really get that shiny, slick look, you need tiny speculars on stuff and if using glossy shaders on stuff isn't enough, one way you can do that is with a mesh (such as a sphere) and giving it emission.

Looks better! The sphere (which is that white circle) isn't visible to the camera so you can get the light paths from the sphere (such that it affects the lighting of the scene) without seeing it. I bumped up the exposure and now it's looking nice and slick and lubed up.

I'm attaching the animatic with the internal render tests for the first internals shot- I haven't polished up the third internals scene (the one around 40 seconds) but I'll be getting to that next. Also, here's this that isn't in the animatic in the attachments! It's fresh off the GPU. I wanted to see what tthis fluid would look like (it's supposed to be a mixture of pre and baby batter so it's a bit thinner but still sort of white)