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.

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