Hi folks! Just wanted to give a little progress update.
A vocal track has been editing together using various samples from voice packs available at OpenNSFW and I've moved on to working on lip syncing and final clean up animation.
I estimate I've managed to complete about 40% of the final animation pass which is decent progress although things have been made considerably slower thanks to the recent heatwave we've been having in the UK.
Running these heavy scenes in Blender turns my PC into a furnace on the best of days but the temperature has been so unbearable recently I've only been able to be productive during the night and early mornings while it was slightly cooler. Thankfully the worst of the heat seems to be over now so hopefully I can pick up the the pace a bit!
I don't have much in the way of new material that I can share but here's some test footage of the inflation rig I made for the the final part of the animation:
Surprisingly this rig is actually relatively simple to make, I think the main reason why this isn't a more commonly seen method (ASFAIK) is that when you have deforming meshes and cloth pressure, it's almost always guaranteed to explode the mesh and crash Blender. Through loads of testing I managed to figure out how to make that not happen!
In fact, somehow the cloth sim is now so stable that while I was stress testing I legitimately couldn't get it to cause Blender to crash! Admittedly this probably doesn't sound too impressive except to anyone who has ever tried to do anything with Blender cloth sims before but if you know, you know!
It wasn't until I added a bunch more collision objects and a fully enclosed room with walls and ceiling and had the rig fully expand inside it that it eventually crashed (actually hard crashed my PC so no footage was saved lol)
So there are still some limitations to a be aware of but I feel what I've learned here has opened up many new possibilities for future expansion related stuff! :)