Hey Everyone!

I've been working on a scene where some “slime” is intended to crawl up a set of objects. I've gotten pretty close to the look I want, but I'm having a hard time getting more dynamic looking results. Right now, it looks like vines or snakes crawling up an object, which is close to what I'm after in terms of the general animation, but I was hoping to break up the shapes a bit more and add some variation. I want to make it look more ‘blobby’ with tendrils branching off.

I've attached my hip file – inside I've got some objects which are intended to be legs, and on those objects I've drawn curves and set velocities. The curves are piped into a fluid source sop, which is initialized as a pump. Then inside my dop network I have the flip solver sourcing the fluid source and copying the velocities.

I've tried many different approaches to arrive at this setup (suction object shelf tools, popcurve force), and this is the only setup that has given me close to what I'm trying to achieve.

Any tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated!

Nice setup you have there.

You may want to switch the Velocity to Blended Average instead of Copy on the SourceVolume. This gives you a target speed control to help manage the speed of the fluid up the leg. Also consider enabling Viscosity. This can make the fluid a bit more goopy.

The blobbyness can be managed, somewhat, from the particle surface node which you don't have in your scene yet. Keep influence scale a bit larger than droplet scale.

Another thing you can do to encourage branching would be to replace your hand drawn curves guides along the leg with a lightning l-system preset (frozen in time). You can use a ray node to project the branching line on to the surface of the leg. Or maybe draw a few branching structure in front view and then project those.

Cool! Thanks for the suggestions – I'll give them a shot.