Attached Link: Download Tentacle Hair (1396 kb)

I made this posable conforming tentacle hair figure a while back and I've just finished it and decided to put it up as a freebie. WARNING: With 267 body parts and over 2000 ERC channels, this thing is really hard on your computer. You'll need a powerful machine handle it. It's all ERC controlled but I didn't go for a full EasyPose implementation because I was trying to keep the number of ERC channels to a minimum. This was sort of an experiment to see what it would take to do a hair object with many posable strands. From that point of view, I regard it as a failure because it's just too resource hungry to be really practical. Maybe in a year or two when computers are more powerful I'll come back to the idea. Thanks to Ecstacy for the Lusydia texture for Vic 3.

Very cool (and, as usual, very disturbing).

Have you considered doing a snake-hair version for Harryhausen-style Medusa animations?

It also includes a dial to scale all of the tentacles at once, so you can do stuff like this. The glowing red spots are a Poser 5 feature and there's a P5 MAT pose included to set them up. Apart from the MAT pose, everything is P4 ready. I'd like to put this in the general free stuff, but I just don't have the bandwidth. Any offers of hosting greatfully accepted :-)

Thanks, LD. Heh, heh - I promise I'll do something cute soon :-) I've had a Medusa hair figure on my to-do list for a long time and this was sort of a test for that idea too. If I reduce the number of strands and take off one or two body parts from each strand, it might work.

that scaled up vers of the hair is really creep due to my fear of spiders, crabs, octupus and squid...well you see where i'm going...it's very cool looking and disturbing, come to think of it just a day ago i wondered if anyone had anything like this......very nice....looking forward to more.

Thanks hellapissed. You don't like spiders, crabs, octopi OR squid? Hmmm... better stay clear of my stuff ;-)

holeee... wow. that is amazingly creepy. 267 body parts??? just to make it friendlier or just for kicks... what if you reduced the number of segments to just the 7 digits per tentacle we can see there? let poser handle the stretching... and do you really need 2000 ERC channels? couldn't each body part just have their xrot, yrot and zrot, xscale, zscale, and yscale have their valueOpDeltaAdd controlled from 6 dials in the BODY or the conforming head bodypart?

WAY cool! I love it. Oh, the possibilities! :-) - Skeetz

Now this I love!! Is is way to cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sweet . Probley wont work on my puter till i upgrade it :(

Thanks everybody :-) Glad you like it! April, There are 38 separate tentacles. Each one is already reduced to the seven segments you can see. 38 times 7 is 266. Add one for the head and you get 267. The only way to reduce it is to have fewer strands, which wouldn't look right (I started with a six by six grid and then added two because there wasn't enough coverage), or fewer than seven segments per strand, which wouldn't look right either :-( The ERC channels used are Scale, xrot, yrot, zrot (that's 4) plus extras for S Bend/Side, Spiral Bend/Side (that's another 4). That gives you eight channels per body part (I'm talking about slave channels, here, not master dials). 8 times 266 is ...umm....2128 I think...which is a lot of ERC. On top of that, there are a couple of extras created by having single body part control over the whole figure. I could halve the number by dropping the S and Spiral dials, but that would substantially reduce the versatility of the figure. You can get some truly cool poses on this thing and I want to keep it that way. So I'm stuck with over 2000 ERC slave channels. As long as your machine can handle it, ease of use is way up there. Most of the time, you only need to use the dials in the head. I've separated them into left and right side dials so you can do asymetrical hair styles easily. If you need to tweek individual strands, then more dials are located in the root of each strand. The dials in the head just drive the dials in the strand roots, so the design is already as efficient as it can be in terms of overal number of slave channels.

oh cool. it couldn't be that heavy then... i'm sure it would run fine on my puter. :) when you said really hard i thought really really hard... hehe. thanks for sharing!

Ajax, this is awesome! Nice work!

Wonderful work. Kinda reminds me of the "Shadow Ships" on the Babylon 5 series.

Thanx alot Ajax,I am sure to put this to use somewhere.

Cool. Creepy, mind you but really cool.

Woot, thanks :)

Too cool! Many thanks Ajax!!

Oh Ajax, you are the Best-- this is wonderful!! Emily

Thanks everybody! I really hope you find it useful :-) Ratteler, The UV mapping is just a cylindrical map around a single segment, repeated on every segment, so whatevery you put on one segment goes on all of them. The segments themselves aren't cylindrical - they're a kind of bone shape. It would look pretty strange with normal hair textures on it. Depending on what kind of feedback I get on this after people have tried using it, I might try to make something similar but designed for transmapped hair. The modelling approach would have to be a little different, just to make the scalp look right.

haha ... many thanks :) - i had a similar idea some time ago, but never found time to do it ... my posable tentacles are WAY simplier ...