Omg, that’s inspiring
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Superb work Simon <3
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For me it looks a bit like flat pressed cotton candy. Its beautiful! 
I also have to try that exercise. I am kinda stuck on the explosion one. My smoke looks like rocks 
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haha I agree, my next try will focus on making it look more smokey instead of … plastic? yes i know the problem with the explosion. it’s not easy to give it a soft look because we always want to put a lot of shading but smoke usually is shaded very subtle.
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Better and better 
Here is my new version.
I’m not sure about it. I like the transition to blueish glow, but the form turned out very uniform. On the other side, I have less wiggly thin lines (and I removed the sphere shape) 
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Today only a sketch. I’ve tried to break the uniform shape, avoid symmetric axis and give it a direction by keeping the upper areas thinner while the lightning gets thicker in the lower parts:
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my first steps into the slimy splash (of the vfx apprentice course). i’ve done a study on the sphere regarding the shading and set base shapes for the splash itself
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Here’s my slime. I had problems getting the bright ground reflections from the concepts into it. It felt more natural to make them darker. I’ll have a look at it again for the bigger concept
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having a hard time doing these studies. not easy to get all those different effects into a material like: light diffusion, reflection, “reflection” on the back side, light refraction (and exiting the material on the oposite side), …
if someone has good slime tutorials, i’d be open for it! <3
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next iteration for slime material. i think the interior works better now (looks volumetric because it’s so blurry) but it’s still missing some slimy vibrancy.
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I did a small study in blender. Just to answer some questions. I don’t know if any of my assumptions are correct - feel free to add you own thoughts. If you want to try around, here is the file: https://nx12131.your-storageshare.de/s/ATZpibr7qK9g79y
Note: This is rendering noise, NOT bubbles
Questions I had:
(1) Why is it dark here?
(2) Why is it bright here?
(3) Why is there a dark rim?
(4) Why is it VERY bright here?
Observation #1 - Specular Reflections (regarding Question 4)
On of the brightest parts of our slime interior is actually a blurred version of the inner spec reflection.
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Spec Reflection on the outer side of the sphere. Light comes from behind the camera. It’s an area light (to get a bigger source size and parallel light rays)
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Spec Reflection of our light but this time on the INSIDE of our sphere!
Here I rotate the sphere. Interesting: Even though my light rays are parallel, the (green) reflection on the inside of the sphere is bigger. Maybe the rays get bent light though a magnifiying glass?
https://imgur.com/qKIpWgF.gif
Here i rotate the sphere a bit and it is super interesting how the inner reflection deforms depending on the viewing angle (white spec spot is in front, green spec point is behind):
https://imgur.com/EtEPWHB.gif
Observation #2 - Roughness (regarding Question 4)
Here you see how the reflections change when I change the roughness of the material. It affects heavily both spec spots: the outer AND of course als the inner. This is one part of the big nice area we saw in the slime before.
https://imgur.com/xFuVUgc.gif
Here I’m the same but with the transmission roughness. This should basically add diffusion within the sphere, making the lights bounce around a lot (note: as the roughness of the material itself doesn’t change, in this example the outer reflection stays sharp - the inner too, but before the light rays can reach the back side, they are already scattered around - at least that’s my guess).
https://imgur.com/GK7Hlix.gif
Also interesting: When the diffusion is very big, you get a dark border. It seems that not much light can exit the sphere and then hit the camera when it exits near the border.
https://imgur.com/jN5z3Fd.gif
Observation #3 - Inverted Reflection (regarding Question 1)
Here is the answer, why my slime was darker in the upper side of the sphere. The transmission turns the world upside down (because it refracts the incoming light). So it’s natural, that it’s brighter in the lower area (if the sky is bright) and darker in the upper area (when the ground is dark):
And here you can see how the impression changes when the reflection gets blurred:
https://imgur.com/jMhJh8B.gif
Observation #4 - Weird Dark Rims
Interesting: Here we see the scene without any light except a grey HDRI - so, gray light from everywhere. And still: sometimes we see very dark rims. Not sure why…because the same light comes from all directions.
Observation #4 - Index of Reflection
IOR changes drastically how the inner reflections look. I had 1.75 as value, not sure why. Might be too high. Water is 1.33.
Observation #5 - Inner Reflection
Brighter spots can also appear in locations where you’d not expect them. Here for example I think I see inner reflections. First the light enters the bubble (1), gets reflected at the back (2) and then continues to bounce around.
With a but transmissive roughness (light scattering) it looks like this:
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I don’t think your observation #3 is correct. Looks more like it’s not a reflection but a refraction of the world behind the sphere. It’s the strong lens effect that turns the world upside down. A reflection wouldn’t be upside down, it would look exactly the same as in a mirror ball.
Good list of observations otherwise, really interesting how well Blender does at simulating what essentially is a complicated combination of light reflections and refractions.
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Oh, yes of course, you are totally right. I’ll correct that in my text. Thanks for the hint!
Here is my new interation. I think I’ll leave it like that and continue the course now
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small update. torak (from booms & blasts discord) took the time and made an overdraw and based on that, i adjusted my drawing a bit. now there’s a clearer hierarchy and not the same detail everywhere
By the way, to define the volume for this slime iteration, i did a small sketch beforehand on how it would look with opaque diffuse material. i found it easier to imagine the forms this way and then used it as a base to think “how would the light would react within theses volumes?”:
By the way #2, this was my ref sheet:
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