Parasaur solo thing, fluids + other stuff before rendering (Patreon)

With the fluids from the tail hole done baking, I've been baking the fluids from his d**k, wrapping that up. In between fluid bakes, I was throwing together a little environment, adding materials to stuff that needed it, adding other small details like for example, some (fake) fluid going through the tube of the machine

This is a mesh that's a bit smaller than the tube with a boolean shape to make it appear like it's moving (the tub inside mesh isn't actually moving, it's just being cut to look like it is).

I did a couple very quick, very "artsy" paintings for the walls to make this not look like a lazy envrironment:

Like, I try to think "how would dinosaur people paint themselves in an abstract, modern-y art type way?"

Also since he has bowling pins he (very likely) puts in his butt, what if he had a bowling ball he could put in there too? Idk, something to... think about. I don't think it's a good idea to put a bowling ball in your butt but if you're a big enough thing like big parasaur guy, then it's more like a very large billiard ball right?

(ignore the sharp models, this is in the viewport without subdivision!)

I mean he could fit that in there, right? I think so.

I also thought it'd be nice to do another rendering of this but in landscape orientation, for greatest detail on the toy going in the hole. So in addition to the portrait orientation, I'll be rendering it in this view as well.

When the time comes, I'll also add some splats to the screen- I think that'd be pretty hot. Like surely some fluid would get on the camera from this fluid extravaganza.

So yeah, it's just been a lot of tweaking materials, fixing up odd things here and there, that sort of thing. Before though I spent just an entire day and a half trying to split the hole fluid bake into alembics. I've talked about this before and it's one of the most annoying things about working with alembics in Blender but exporting to alembic is so freaking sensitive. The bake itself took like 65 hours:

But in order to have a (more) stable render and to also bake more fluids like for the squirting from his dong, I need to export the bake into alembic. I wish I could just do *one* bake and leave my computer exporting alembic without having to worry about blender quitting but I have to baby sit it and the more complex the fluid mesh is, the higher the chance the export will quit before it's done.

If Blender crashes before the alembic is done exporting, the exported alembic is unusable. It's corrupted. Even if it was 1 frame away from being done, nope. So to minimize the chance of Blender crashing before an Alembic is done baking, I have to split the bakes into smaller parts.

This is nothing new, I've been having to do this since I started doing long, complicated and heavy fluid sims. But it's just so annoying because having all these alembics loaded in the scene makes it so much more laggy to navigate/save, each alembic chunk has to be keyframed on/off when it starts/ends and I also test every single alembic bake to make sure the motion blur works (it's a color attribute and for some ungodly reason that's unchecked by default so I make super duper sure I check it before exporting and also make sure it works)

An example:

Because if motion blur doesn't work on one of these chunks and I've already cleared the fluid cache, I'll have to rebake *the entire thing up to that point* to get the motion blur vector stuff and I really don't want to do that.

I've attached two movie things, one is the viewport with all the fluid alembics and the other is a test render I did of the fluids with an earlier version of the material. This is to kind of check out how stuff might look in the render and also to help get a better feel for sounds (since next thing is to add the sounds!)

(The parasaur's eyes are a bit weird at times in the thumbnail render preview, those need to be animated better >_> you'll see what I'm talking about)

I've been working on other stuff as well, between baking things and renders. More on that soon...

If I do another short animation between the stuff I'm currently working on, I'm not doing so much fluids. I love the way the fluids look, I think that's something that makes my stuff stand out amongst the crowd, but man it takes a long time to test/bake/process them. I think it would be just limited to a money shot for a few hundred frames, none of this... thousand+ frame fluid bake stuff (with *multiple* different fluid bakes where fluid comes out of more than one place)

I was (still am?) seriously considering not including the full fluid stuff from his dong but I think it adds some nice hotness? Like, that knot is just... obliterating his prostate, so he's just constantly leaking/squirting from it. His junk/hole is very sensitive to stimulation to begin with, so making him leak like a faucet and squirt like a water gun is easy.

And I think that conveys the idea you know? (Ignore all the fluid objects, I had to un-make them flip fluid objects which makes them all visible again and this is the last viewport render I did before starting the final fluid bake of his squirting)

Anyway, technical stuff aside, I'm sorry this has taken forever (like everything else I do it seems >_>) and maybe I'm just way too much of a perfectionist about this fluid BS. I want them to look nice but it can take so long. But when they look nice the results can be so good... but then it takes forever. I can thankfully work on other stuff as fluids bake but still... I get a bit sad that I finish the character animation so long before all the bells and whistles are done.