Hello Friends!
I tried making a hognose snake curl simulation.
Simulating the snake curling animation was a very interesting process because it is the first time where I had to simulate the fat and the muscles coupled together in order to get proper interaction.
This was especially prominent for when the head was peeking out from the curl.
In the muscle-only pass, the head would collide with the muscles properly but wouldn't leave enough room for the fat to interact with - so when it was time to simulate the fat pass, the collision got quite messy.
On top of that, the spine was also slightly simulated so that it would have some nice droopiness, but was not benefitting from any muscle/fat interaction.
Therefore, by simulating the fat and muscles together, not only was the fat pushing the muscles up, it was also pushing the spine up to create nice spine bulging too.
Overall the coupled simulation came to around 2 ~ 4 min/frame.
Rendered with Arnold. Scales done with XGen.
I really liked playing around with the Contact Sliding option. It really grounded the bottom layer of the curl to the ground, and really saved a lot of animation time.