An animation project I am on involves a dog running across a lake made of jello. As it runs, the jello is kicked behind it in giant ripple/waves. Also, the lake reacts to wherever its feet are while standing or walking, dipping in a few inches. At one point the dog rolls into a ball and as it rolls, it pushes up huge waves on the lake surface that then merge together into a tunnel that it rolls through.

Any ideas on the best way to approach this? I've thought of using flip fluids, or running particles along a path, merging them, then skinning the entire thing.

How would you go about this project?

If you don't know where to start, I'd consider finding an easier project.

i would take a look at the ripple solver. you can make it much ‘smarter’ by using it with a sop solver to start the ripples.

a simple method to do this would be to take your dog and add velocity to its points. then in the sop solver attribute transfer the velocity to the points on the ripple field. finally in a vopsop in the sop solver displace the ripple field surface by the inverse of the velocity.

its super fast, and will give you much more controllable ripples than flips imo.