Stomach with Bifrost fluid simulation - Playblast

Hohoho, this has been a long time coming! Since there won't be any fur to render for the upcoming internal scenes, I've been able to migrate them to the latest version of Maya and fully rely on Redshift for rendering these. I remember posting about this back when I first started making the animation, as I had already migrated the stomach environment to the new renderer back then. I finally got back to it after the release of the Encounter 2 preview and started improving the materials a bit and fixed some visual glitches like that horrible UV displacement seam at the top of the stomach model.

Since I now have Maya's latest CG toolkit at my disposal, I thought I should go all the way with this scene and give fluid simulation another try. I had actually experimented with that many years back, but back then rendering a fully path-traced frame took multiple hours and wasn't really feasible for a one-man band animation house. I must also admit I was never particularly happy with the results of Maya's old fluid simulation methods, so I was quite thrilled to finally give this another try with Bifrost! It's quite funny since stuff like Bifrost and Realflow used to be almost exclusive to big-budget Hollywood animation and now it's pretty much accessible for everyone with a somewhat modern PC!

Since the stomach mesh had way too many polygons for particle collision, I ended up making an alternative low-poly mesh and transferred the animation onto it with a simple wrap deformer. Getting the fluids to move in a believable (and aesthetically pleasing) manner took quite a lot of iterations. A full simulation of 1200 frames took a full hour on my somewhat dated i7-8700K, which is why I ended up literally upgrading my CPU to an i9-9900K, which made working with this kind of heavy simulation a bit easier. The only remaining challenge will be the rendering, as a single frame already took about 10 minutes at 3K resolution. The additional fluids increased that up to 15 minutes, which means that for this specific scene I'll end up using frame interpolation, as rendering this at a native 60FPS is probably going to take so long that we'll see the release of a Duke Nukem Forever sequel by the time this finishes rendering. The heavy part here isn't so much the fluid sim, but the actual water shader, which uses multi-layered subsurface scattering, rough refractions, as well as caustics, while being on top of another complex material (the stomach surface). I swear, this thing could be its own ray tracing benchmark.

Note that December is going to be terribly rough for me as I'm still catching up on a ton of things that I needed to pause to get the recent preview out, including client work. I'm still hoping I can manage to get a decent portion of the internal scene done this month, which is still going to need a bit of additional work before I can get to back to animating it! In the meantime, thank you guys so much for the overwhelming feedback on the Encounter 2 preview! It was a huge relief for me to hear that most of you enjoyed it! ;w;