Here's one more render of the same animation, with a closer camera, so you can really appreciate the details of the saliva. 😆
I did make one small change to the animation from the original "in the round" version. I noticed that in a few frames, the tongue clipped through the teeth, so I fixed that. Thankfully, only about 80 frames had to be re-rendered - the rest remained the same.
After rigging up the piranha plant, I had to do an animation - so here's a simple "idle" animation of the plant just hanging out in its pot, as the camera spins around to show the entire plant.
It was never really meant to be viewed from the back, so the part where the "feathers" stick out is a tiny bit dicey. I also had some issues getting my rig to work the mouth properly, and spent way too much time editing the curves on the flying spittle. Overall though, I really like how this turned out!
I opened up this project one more time to play around with Blender 4.0 and ended up doing a fair bit of alterations to it, including fully rigging the piranha plant, adding better lighting, and re-working a lot of the materials to make them fully procedural.
Some of the materials still rely on textures, but I've removed most of the more unnecessary ones - and largely improved the materials in the process. More to come!
Sometimes I like taking work from other mediums and recreating it in Blender. This morning I saw this post on Mastodon, and though it might be a good warm-up.
It took a bit longer than I expect, but I'm happy with it. And it doesn't tread too hard on the original, in my opinion, which is good when I'm pulling inspiration from other people's work.
This was the final version of my cereal shuffling machine animation, where tons of cereal gets dropped into the scene, and then slowly churned away.
I had to add some special, hidden physics blocks to keep all the cereal contained as it was disposed of, but you can't really tell from the limited view. I also adjusted the background to be a little warmer for this one. I was getting tired of the colder blue/purple fade.
It took a long time to render this one - 2,290 frames, each taking 6-10 seconds to finish.
I didn't release this one on other social media, but this was an intermediate step towards my ultimate goal: adding tons of cereal pieces! 😆
After a bit of tinkering, I finally got the physics to cooperate and properly dispose of all the cereal pieces, make the animation loop seamlessly. There's always room for improvement, however!
Almost got it with this one. Timing is off, though!
I took a break from modeling more cereal pieces to play around with physics some more. I came up with this weird cereal shuffling machine that emerges from the floor to clear out the fallen pieces... it doesn't quite work, though! 😅
I modeled and created materials for a few more cereal pieces... I kinda want to have about 10 different types, and then mix them all together. Some of these materials look simple in real life, but are quite hard to replicate, even without shooting for complete realism, in Blender.