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!
After a couple of days goofing around with this, I think it's in a pretty decent place. It now has dynamic clouds, drawn in 3D, and a moon that has phases!
I might come back and clean things up later, but for now, this is fine. My project doesn't even have anything to do with any of this stuff, it's just for the background!