Suspended Fox (Full Animation) (Patreon)

(Animation is attached below.)

Before reading the blurb, I've created a new poll. If you're interested, you can fill it out here: https://forms.gle/YsEXWxoCBuCiX9Xk6

Now, onto the description!

After over a month of work, this animation is finally complete. It's not the longest animation I've ever done, but it definitely got up there in length and took a while to finish. There's a few experimental things happening here, such as being my first animation to feature a character's member coming out and gradually becoming erect.

I also experimented with empty objects for additional animation, animating the basic up and down thrusting motion on his hips and his legs, but because I wanted him to be able to dangle and swing around a bit, I added empty objects which his hips/legs were then parented to so I could get some secondary motion in there. I could have also done this with a combination layer, and now having tried it like this, I think the combination layer would have been easier.

Another difficulty was trying to animate him dangling upside-down. It makes me severely regret never setting up FK bones for his legs, as trying to animate this sort of motion with IK was an absolute nightmare.

Using empty objects as parents also introduced an unexpected problem: When it came time to do the fluid sim, I normally scale up the scene so that the fluid sim doesn't have issues with the smaller real-world scales of my scenes. However, because the hips and legs were parented to the empties, I was unable to scale the fox's armature, which is an issue I've never seen in Blender before, lol. 

Thankfully I figured out how to bake the entire animation down into one single action, and from there I exported the fox mesh with animation as a .fbx, which I then opened up in another file so I could scale it up and do the fluid sim there. I then had to export just the fluid itself as an alembic file so I could import it back into the main project and scale it back down. Definitely the most effort I've ever done for a fluid sim.

But I really don't know how some animators manage to get super high resolution fluid that sticks to their characters. Even with viscosity enabled (which I ended up not doing here), it just looks like curdled milk and then falls right off the character. Maybe Blender's default fluid simulator can't emulate the sort of behavior I'm after.

Anyway, that's all I can think to write at the moment. Since this was such a big animation, and because it took multiple days of leaving my computer on all day and overnight to render, I probably won't have the exclusive angles out until next week. But I'll be sure to post them as soon as they're ready.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading! :D