Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/hiad

Hello again everyone. :D

After a few weeks of struggle, I finally have a new animation to show for my efforts; the third and (probably) final part to my small "hyena on a rock" series.

This one gave me HEAPS of trouble, but it's the first time I've been able to get fluids working -- something I've been intending to do for a long while but was never able to get it right.

There were a lot of problems with it, between the fluid sim straight up not baking at all, to it freezing and crashing the computer if I set the fluid sim to any reasonable resolution.

At one point, I had left Blender baking the sim overnight only to check it in the morning and find that, even though it had been baking the simulation, it hadn't rendered out any fluid at all. It was terrible, lol.

So there were a lot of little things I tried to attempt to get it working. I tried scaling up the size of the "inflow" objects: the meshes that are responsible for actually putting fluid into the scene. The size of these can cause Blender to struggle with the simulation, either making very low-res results or even refusing to bake at all if they're too small.

I attempted to scale down the "domain", which is the cubic area wherein the simulation takes place. The resolution of the sim is dependent on the scale of this domain, so if you have a smaller domain you can get better results with less resolution. But unfortunately, I pretty much had it as small as it could get while still being able to interact with the scene in a somewhat believable way.

I also found that if you end up telling the domain to "use speed vectors" for the purpose of generating motion blur on the fluid, then it completely breaks the domain and it will never render fluid again no matter what. That issue may be entirely unique to me though, lol.

So, I would have had this animation done sooner, but through all of the problems I ran into with the fluid sim it set everything back at least a week later than I intended.

Ultimately, I'm pretty happy with the fluid sim itself, though next time I think I'll try to make the fluid a bit more visible and try to make it more viscous and less water-like.

The animation's also a bit messed up, not as polished as I'd like it. There's also a pretty egregious error in this one -- see if you can spot it -- that I had noticed before but ended up forgetting about, and it snuck by me and got into the finished product. I was pretty disappointed when I noticed it, but at this point I REALLY don't dare touch the animation in case it ends up breaking the fluid sim again, lol.

Anyway, thanks a bunch if you've read this far, haha. I know these post-animation reports can get a bit lengthy and technical, but I enjoy writing them.

Also if you like this stuff, please consider supporting me on Patreon to get exclusive rewards. Every little bit helps give me the drive to make more content.

And as always, enjoy. :D