Lost Proxy - [Update] Sweaty Summertime Shrinking – Scene-building, fx, liquid simulation

I've finished scene-building the environment and setting up the base lighting for the scene, as well as the last lingering bits of fx-work too, including liquid simulation. Now it's just a case of going through shot by shot and linking in the new environment then tweaking lighting and/or materials as needed. That basically leaves me in "render (and re-render) as you go" territory for putting together the final thing. So that's what I'll be doing, along with making some preparations ahead of getting into audio stuff.

Rog, Lug and Hugo are now no longer trapped in the void! Originally I was planning on the environment having a more summer-beach vibe, but I decided to combine the patio area into the house I already modelled for Rog and Lug ages ago:

The downstairs interior of this house has already been featured in the Putting His Feet Up render-set. It's a model I'd like to update in the future, given how much I've learned about making and baking materials since then. Anyway, I decided to move things in a more cactus-desert flavoured direction because of that (though I've kept some palms outside of the garden anyway).

I'm going to continue with rendering primarily with EEVEE, and since this project is still stuck in version 4.3 (a mark of how long I've been working on this project) I'm missing out on a lot of Blender lighting updates that have been made since then.

That means I've got more limitations around how I light the scene, so I've broken it up into two parts: the patio and garden area, and then everything outside that. I'm lighting and rendering these separately and then compositing them together on top of a custom HRDI:

Speaking of that, using 4.3 means I don't get to use the improved version of Blender's sky texture (basically a procedural sky). So I hopped over to 5.0 to make and bake one to a HDRI in Cycles, so I could then import that back into 4.3:

Originally I was going to include a bunch of volumetric clouds in that too, but that ended up being way too resource heavy for my PC (as in it refused to render that at all), so I've isolated some clouds from an existing HDRI and mixed them into the sky shader before baking it.

Back in 4.3 EEVEE, HDRI-based lighting isn't all that great (compared to Cycles). So I'm mainly using this as a background to be composited in, instead of something that's actually contributing any light into the scene. All the environmental lighting has instead been set up manually, with sun lamps for the sun (heh) then point and area lamps for bounce lighting.

Most non-simulation fx-work was small stuff like fake liquid physics for the drink bottles, and adding some more animated sweat drops in some shots. I don't think I've gone over how I did the fake liquid physics in previous updates, so I'll quickly cover that (since it's a fairly simple trick).

First I modelled the liquid inside the bottle as a closed (manifold) mesh. Then I modelled a separate cutting mesh (which I displace with some animated waves) and used that with a Boolean modifier to remove the top portion of the liquid:

I used a re-mesh modifier to clean up the messy cut, and then it's just a case of animating the cutting mesh to create the illusion of liquid sloshing about or being drained out of the bottle (along with a custom material for foam).

The big thing was finally doing liquid simulation for Hugo's climax, something I've generally been avoiding in my animations so far (given how cumbersome it is).

Originally I tried to simulate this with Blender's own liquid simulation engine Mantaflow, but eventually switched over to using the FLIP Fluid addon instead, and from there things went quite smoothly. Most of it was just continuously tweaking settings and re-baking the result until I had something I was happy with.

Really the biggest hurdle was getting fluid to actually stick to the underside of Lug's toe. This required setting up a force field mesh very close to the proxy mesh I was using as a collider, which basically meant that the simulation ignored gravity within that very thin margin:

After that, it was just a case of setting up a dynamic paint brush and canvas duo to produce a moist stain where liquid landed on Lug's toe to complete the effect. On the whole I'm fairly happy with the results, and simulating it with the FLIP Fluid addon ended up being much less of a hassle (at least for smaller scale stuff like this).

All that's left is linking in the new environment for all the shots and making some adjustments to the lighting as each requires. That and updating some of the character materials so that everything matches between shots. This is very much render-as-you-go territory, so updates for Summertime Shrinking going forward are basically going to cover how much of it has been rendered and composited for the finished thing.

As a reminder, this animation is 4 minutes and 45 seconds long, which is the longest animation I've done so far. So while it's fairly resource-light, and being rendered in EEVEE too, it's still probably going to take quite a while to work through and re-render every shot.

As with other animations, my plan is to render this in chunks instead of leaving it running 24/7 (as I'll need to use my pc for other things in between). I may also take this opportunity to dive back into modelling more stuff for the Tunnel Pumping render comic as well.

Audio is something I usually leave as the last thing to do after everything is all rendered out, but there is one important exception to that which is voice acting. Seeing as how everything that happens in this animation is now set in stone, now is the time to reach back out to folks to see if they're available to do voice work.

I'm still in the process of looking around for someone to voice Lug at the moment, so if that doesn't look like it's going to pan out, or it looks like getting voice acting done in general isn't going to be possible any time soon, I'll probably go with releasing a no-voice audio version first (and then hopefully I can come back to do voice-work at a later date) over delaying things.

I'll cover my plans for audio more once I've rendered everything, this is just to let you know I'll be doing some voice/audio-work preparation stuff ahead of time.