Microcosm - Work in Progress #2

Shot 1 Full Render Preview

This WIP took a little bit longer than usual to put out as I wanted to have the first shot fully rendered by the time I got to it. Needless to say, I'm very happy happy with the result! The full resolution version of this preview is located in the description below.

Fluid Simulation

I used a combination of techniques for my fluid simulation. The first technique I used was to essentially "fake" the drip coming off of Aak's dick through the use of a "mesh deform" modifier in combination with a cage mesh. This cage mesh (highlighted in orange) is simulated via cloth and deforms the liquid droplet underneath.

In the case of the precum that flies out of Aak's dick, that is actual fluid simulated using LiquiGen. LiquiGen is faster than Houdini in a lot of ways, and this is one of them. Using a very simple sphere emission object and a proxy of the terrain mesh for a collider, I was able to get the pre droplets to interact with the landscape. Unfortunately I didn't have time to do some grain simulation for the terrain... next time!

Environment

I held a little poll over on my Discord to decide where the animation would take place, and you all voted to have it take place in an apartment! The environment itself is quite simplistic compared to the tiny city that you all saw last WIP. Of course, I needed some exterior lighting, so I placed a few buildings with some parallax interior outside of the windows to make the location a bit more believable.

Lighting

Interior lighting can be extremely difficult, and for this shot there was certainly no exception. The first rendered attempt is below. I tried using some volumetrics to help the light spread out more through the scene, but something went wrong and black spots that couldn't be lit started appearing. The most apparent spot was on the underside of Aak's dick, facing the camera.

While I liked this style of a more "moody" lighting, I think it lacked the punch that the finished shot's lighting gives. It also prevented me from lighting the city, which is a huge problem considering it a focal part of the image.

I ended up settling on this very simple three point lighting setup with some ambient light coming in from the environment. It allowed me to keep Aak's silhouette with rim lighting while also squeezing out more juicy detail from the render. It also eliminated the nasty focal point that the lamp was in the right of the image.

And that's all for this WIP! Thank you so much for being patient while I work through this project. This is a new workflow for me but I would like to get better at it so I can offer more animations like this in the future.