Posting this a couple of days later than usual sorry! The past week has been pretty terrible animation progress wise...
The new method I came up with where I'm blending vertex weight groups on a single simulated proxy mesh kept failing at certain parts in the animation and the physics would either explode randomly or break down in very odd (and traumatising) ways.
It took me several days to figure out the cause and eventually come up with a fix...
(I duplicated and inverted the vertex group that influences pressure strength and plugged it into the Tension/Damping parameters to create a very rudimentary tension map that mirrors pressure changes and prevents any funky happenings!)...and unfortunately it made most of what I had animated last week unusable so I had to re-adjust the rig and re-animate pretty much eveything which was very frustrating but was also a very good lesson learned about properly testing my shit before animating anything.
Anyway, I'm now pretty much back to where I was last week in terms of progress but on the plus side I think I actually did a much better job and the animation looks slightly less jank and with a much more stable physics rig I'm finding I can do some really neat stuff...
Here's a few quick preview stills to give an idea on where things are heading...
Hopefully I'll be back to update on Sunday as usual! Have a good week! :)