Brig/Tracer BDSM Breakdown

  Hi guys, just wanted to do a little breakdown/post-mortem on the Brig/Tracer animation. This was a big one and I learned a fair bit. Just gonna go through the animation and share some of the noteworthy aspects and techniques I used. 

  First up we have the device that Tracer is bound in; the hands/feet are kept in place with "child-of" constraints. You can actually grab the object itself to pull her forward/back. I didn't get a chance to use the functionality in this animation, but it could be an interesting twist for something in the future (pulling back/forward to enhance the sensation or affect of the bondage).

  To really sell the effect, shapekeys are invaluable. For each model I added over a dozen individual shapekeys for shaking/jiggling. I tend to avoid physics sims at the moment, since they often become unpredictable and I knew the characters would be very close together for the majority of time, thus maintaining control of the animation (especially the breasts) would be important. Instead, I added "jiggle" shapekeys, grabbing the object and using the proportional edit tool to move the mesh.

  When making the shapekey, you can extend the range into the negative to obtain the inverse effect, which often saves you the time of making another shapekey for the opposite direction. 

  You can never go too far with the jiggling shapes; the WHOLE body jiggles in a situation like this, so I add them for the arms, back, thighs, and belly fat (my favorite). You then delay the jiggle in accordance with the main motion; I.E., jiggle shape keyframes are 1-2 frames behind the main body movement (if they play at the same time you may not notice the effect). 

  For the liquid I went very basic, using sphere objects and the "follow path" constraint to animate them. At some point I want to delve more into liquid sims (probably when Mantaflow is further in development with Blender 2.8.3 or later), but sims are expensive, hard to setup, and unpredictable, and I like having as much control of the animation as possible. Just a few bad frames can ruin a render. 

  For Tracer's orgasm squirting, I made the squirt animation in a separate file and linked it over, just to keep things less messy (already dealing with two rigs, lights, cameras, objects, etc, so I didn't need another 50 curve objects in the scene).

  The spheres have a shapekey to stretch them out, animated "on" at the apex of the curve.

   I wasn't sure how best to do the "cum" between Brig's fingers. It turned out to be perhaps the easiest effect of the whole animation! I simply duplicated the Brigitte rig, deleted all the un-needed faces, and joined together a few faces between the fingers using the "bridge edge loops" command. When she spreads her fingers, the "cum" ended up deforming perfect, like an accordion. Very little extra work was needed! It's nice when something seemingly complicated turns out to be so simple.

  This is probably my favorite effect in the animation, due to how genuine I think it looks, how complicated I thought it would be, and how easy it actually was. 

  There's plenty more little things I could share, but that's a lot of the stuff that stands out to me. Every animation brings about little issues to solve and of course there are things I thought could be done better, but you know, at some point you have to release the damn thing. 

  Let me know if you have any questions! Going forward my "big" animations will be just a tad shorter, since this one ended up being released later than I wanted and I still want to keep up with doing monthly loops/Foot Club animations. As my skill increases though, expect the length/quality to increase as well. I'm in this for the long-term!

  Hope everyone is having a good weekend! On to the next project...