Raptor scene, cloth sim and polish done, fluid bake started (Patreon)

This was challenging to get right but I think it finally is decent enough. First, the balls. I tried a couple different ideas- one was to create a physics object that would help give a general motion the balls would follow.

(This is a soft body object, despite looking like it's solid!)

Mess around with that idea, couldn't get this idea to work. Might have some potential some day but it just wasn't working...

Using bone dynamics wouldn't cut it either, they just don't work well with collisions that would involve resting on a surface (his shorts). So I did my best to manually polish the balls animation, it's not perfect but I think it looks natural enough.

I got that mostly sorted out, then moved on finishing off the cloth interaction stuff. It took a while but I got the cloth to work the way I wanted. Cloth sims are awful. You can never just make a shirt and put it on a character and expect it to work even remotely well (or not take a very long time or crash completely) so I only used some of the torso and arms as colliders. The shorts use several simple objects (and the meat uses a cylinder near the base to move the shirt around)

Also to make sure the shirt stays on him (and doesn't go above the neck) he has additional stuff around the shoulders and neck.

You can use pinning to make sure those verts stay in one place (so you can make sure the shoulder cloth never falls off the shoulders or goes through the neck) but that doesn't look natural when there's a lot of motion (the pin verts don't move at all vs. the rest of the shirt around it). So instead I just used more objects to force the shirt to stay on him.

Even with max friction and damping the shirt can fly off the body with extra colliders. I don't know if I'm just an idiot and can never figure out cloth but I think calling cloth simulation a "simulation" is extremely misleading. It's more like cloth abstraction.

Whatever, finally got a good sim that has minimal clipping (and where there is clipping I could use lattices to fix it)

(Top is with lattices, bottom is without, notice around the hand, bottom clips through the shorts!)

The shorts were probably the most annoying thing to deal with... I used a bunch of lattices, more lattices than on the shirt, to fix bad clipping. If I do shorts again, I might just try doing cloth sim because augh... rigging shorts, animating them with the character and then fixing stuff with lattices is tedious.

Here's a comparison:

Some lattices are attached to bones, such as the nut here, helps to make the cloth look like it's been affected by it.

Here's a low res, low sample render to get an idea of what it'll look like rendered:

Really really happy with the look of the shorts. The shirt looks suitable cloth like too. And the shadows should help hide any minor clipping (the fingers on his right hand clip a bit through the shorts but... not enough to where it will look bad I hope)

I also thought this would be a good opportunity to use that dumb alien guy I made awhile. The shirt is supposed to be an worn tank-top, one of those shirts you've had forever and it's been washed a zillion times so it's just perfectly comfy and feels nice to wear around the house. (it's hard to tell but it's the slightly transparent, like you can baaarely see it but on the left part of the image you can see a bit of the Taylor's chest and the back side of the shirt)

One thing that sucks about the shirt being there is that I animated his tummy/lower tummy near pelvis and when the meat flexes and I think it looks great and was hoping that it would show up through the cloth sim... but it doesn't. You can't tell it's happening. But know that there's some contracting going on.

I've attached the final character motion + cloth sim + clipping fixes (the last ~40 frames are padding, just incase I might need some more but only the frames up to 3654 should end up being used)

I've also attached the lower res renders I did. There's no fluid yet but I'm current running the fluid sim. I might have to do some working around though because the domain around all the area the fluid can go is big and the domain res is high... so I run out of memory like, very quickly. Like try baking parts in chunks, adjusting the domain size to fit the liquid per chunk...

This one freaking sequence has been rather annoying because all these dynamics, shorts, shirt, nuts, all the fluid tests up to this point but man... I think it's going to be kick @ss when full rendered with the fluid. Sorry it's taken awhile for this one scene but I just want to make it right.