Oviposition (Full Animation) (Patreon)

Back again! with an animation that took way longer than expected, lol. There were definitely some hurdles with this one.

So obviously one of the biggest things was getting the tentacle to inflate, and the last time I'd done that, back in the Slime Pit animation, I did so using a warp modifier and a couple of differently scaled invisible spheres to adjust the size of the tentacle. However, for reasons still unknown to me, trying that same approach in this animation was causing the bulge to be distorted and elongated, more like a large cylinder than a round egg. I checked everything, making sure the transformations on the tentacle were correct, trying to make sure there was enough mesh density to support the bulge, checking transformations on the deformation spheres. But with everything I looked at, the problem remained.

After a while I remembered that people are able to do some pretty amazing things with geometry nodes, one of which is displacing geometry. But after a while of tinkering and looking at tutorials and utterly failing, I remembered that Cycles materials already has a displacement node, and I could just plug a gradient texture into it. The gradient texture used an empty as its texture coordinates, and the empty used a curve modifier to move it along the same curve that's deforming the tentacle -- and just like that, the problem of how to get the egg bulge was solved.

As usual, I had to try and implement some experimental stuff for this one. I'm always working on my models, changing things around. So this time I experimented with physics, using a chain of vertices with a cloth sim on them. You can see this in action in my prior animation, A Slimy Snack, where the drool is swinging back and forth. In this animation, I used the same technique for the hyena's balls, and I added a bone with some weight painting to the area, with the bone using a "stretch to" modifier to track an empty parented to the end of the vertex chain.

I also utilized the same sort of system for his hindquarters, and overall I think the two things together added a lot to the animation. There was also the belly bulge and the inflation, both of which used a couple new bones with weight painting on the relevant belly areas, which I then manually animated.

Animating was mostly a straightforward process, with a few hiccups here and there with things like the feet/legs resetting their location every so often.

Altogether the animation took a lot of time, and definitely wore me down. I'm still a bit undecided on what I should do after this one, but I've got a few ideas that I'll put into a poll soon enough.

Thanks for reading :D