FX riddle - How would yo do this?

Hi there! I’m bringing to you an FX riddle that I had to solve on August for a job. It could be great if you share your own solutions and see if there’s more than a way to solve it.

So this is the problem: there has to be an oil spill on a ship’s deck. A mat are place on it in order to absorb the oil and then a squeegee wipes the spill twice throwing oil to a bunch of mats that are already placed in the spill.

Here you can see a scheme of how the spill must be:


And here a video of the animation I had right before starting with the FX work

At first, I wanted to use Fluid Simulation but the results for static fluids on a ground are very wonky… So there are 3 ways to face this: with simulation, with other techniques… and a mix of simulation and other stuff.

So, how would you do it?

I’ll post my result next week after Blender Conference tide.

Cheers!