Triple Threat (Patreon)

WHEW. My goodness, lol. So this one here was supposed to be a "short" animation made toward the middle of the month, something to do in-between releases and getting started on the poll winner. But in my effort to make a short animation, I ended up making the longest animation I've done so far, lmao.

This is actually a concept I've been wanting to do for a while, shortly after "Mud Wrath" came out and I did the double-tentacle animation. Then, again more recently, as evidenced by the title of "Three Tentacles", I had intended to extend that to have the other two tentacles plunge into his rear.

But I ended up breaking that animation somehow (might have forgotten to protect the animation data somewhere), so this time I've done it all from scratch: fresh scene and new animation.

For the approach to this one, I made a basic loop and then repeated it, and used an NLA track to make variations and adjustments to the character's movements. I also used these tracks to have sections of the animation which slowed down and sped up. 

Though it did get a bit tricky once the third tentacle was in play: I couldn't get a loop reliably going with it, since there were loops already going with the other two which were affecting the character. So for the third one, I just made one big animation sequence.

After a certain point, using the NLA becomes almost as tedious as making the animation in a bunch of long, separate actions.

As for the issues...holy hell the issues, lmao. After I had done the initial pass on this (about two weeks ago, now), I started scrubbing through the animation slowly and finding problems to fix. There were SO MANY problems, that I had to start writing down in a document issues that needed to be addressed. It took a long while but I'm pretty sure I've fixed 99% of the issues.

This animation has also made me really thankful that I'm so close to finishing the new hyena, as well. This old character is so broken it's not even funny. Half of the time he doesn't even work properly, and when he does it's because I had to break out the weight painting tools all over again. His paws don't work properly, his throat clips through his neck, and next thing I know I'm re-fixing things I thought I fixed ten animations ago, lmao.

As for the fluid, this is the most trouble I've ever had with fluid, and I honestly should have anticipated that considering the length of the animation. It set me back an entire week, and even though it's not perfect, this is the result after, no hyperbole, 37 different attempts (and probably close to 80 hours doing different bakes).

There were tons of issues with it, and the main one was that the fluid sim kept randomly deciding to "explode" halfway through baking. It would look like a great sim, and all of the sudden, boom, force out of nowhere, liquid flying everywhere. Tweaked a LOT of different settings to get that to stop, but I couldn't figure it out. In the end I had to disable viscosity, which is a damn shame because I REALLY wanted the fluid to be sticky.

So, it's low-res, but it's actually working and it's not exploding -- so I'm done with it. Henceforward I'm gonna have to anticipate fluid sims and their potential to massively delay my releases.

Because this animation released a week later than expected, the public release might not end up coming out until the beginning of September; reason for that being that I don't like releasing too close to the end of the month. 

That's pretty much everything I can think of, and honestly I'm exhausted just thinking about it, lmao. If you've read all this, I really appreciate it. A lot of time goes into these write-ups, and I hope at least some of you find this stuff interesting, as I enjoy talking about it.

Also the ATWT and Diamond angles for this will be coming soon, likely in a few days; it's just taking an exorbitantly long time to render, haha.

Thanks again, and enjoy the animation! :D