Hey this is pretty nice !!! Pure GOLD !!!
nice tricks…!!! I Will definitely try out more stuff with Distance …
I did play around a bit with Woody test but this is even more creative !
Thanks for sharing
This video is easier to see what’s going on…
The ‘Red’ cubes are
soft transforms parented under the root of the character so they will always move locally where my creature is.
I’ve made distance constraints from those red cubes to the tips of the tentacles so they get pulled along where the red cubes are doing… and where is that… to the mouth 
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Some rough storyboard ideas…
We start with a floating wrench, hand grabs it. right into a smash into the face of one alien , teeth go flying, wind up for another hit! but gets grabbed with teeth chomping down on his smashing hand.
He uses toothless to smash the one holding his arm. which stuns it, giving the space man enough time to grab a tentacle , pull and rip it off… we pull to a wide and see a HUGE alien opening its mouth and in a flash Spaceman is lunch! then we have a shot of the alien just eating with his mouth open… maybe we get bits of spaceman flying out the mouth?
Thoughts?
Ideas?
How can we make this even more complex ? I’m also going to have extra aliens holding onto the spaceman the whole time…
I would NOT want to animate this sequence without ragdoll …
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Great! I sense a few slow-motion shots. 
Moving onto an animatic now to get a sense of flow and timing. It’s going to be loose but with Ragdoll we’re going to get some nice looking details right from the start… Here’s a quick test for the last shot where the spaceman gets eaten !
Fun Tip - you can
breaklibs off by having yourTranslate Motionset tosoftwith a highStiffnessand lowDamping
Animate both thePose Stiffness andTranslate Stiffnessto0so there wont be anything controlling themarker`
Here I’m using two Pins to pull the alien apart … I animate the values on the area in which I want the break to happen make sure you set the Translate Motion to soft
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… nice tips !!..
I can only imagine how long would it take me to animate that motion without RG…
…
nice stuff , thanks for sharing !
Eeeeeek 
For future readers, this worked because of the solver is freaking out. This should will likely (hopefully) have been addressed by the time you read this. There will be a Breakable = On attribute, with a Break Force = 10 attribute to determine at what point to break apart.
Love the big beast. Picturing the lighting for this waters my mouth. 
Also it reminds me of an episode of Rick and Morty (S02 E11)
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Blocking out some of the ideas, Might speed the actions up to get it all in for around 20 seconds…
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Goshhhh!!! How many versions can you do in a day???
This is looking really cool!!! the floaty feeling works pretty good
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I’m blown away by this work, and these results. I need to animate tentacles coming out of a fridge and scooping something up. I feel I should learn this kit, in order to do it. Looks like it will fit the purpose so well.
Looking forward to see how you get on…
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Welcome to the forums!
Glad you’re liking the progress, I used to stay away from animating complex tentacle actions, Not anymore Give the tool a try and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out on the forum
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I started writing all of this as a post but got dense fast… So I made a nice little video for a simple tentacle setup. Once I get a rig setup for the alien I can do a more in depth look but this has some nice basics to play with…
ALSO
Here is the maya scene the play with :
squid.zip (68.0 KB)
The whole setup and animation was under
20 minutesfrom maya opening to the animation you see here.
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Also having a bit of play with this spaceman.
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Has anyone tried simulating their cameras?
I’ve kept the camera local to the spaceman as a Soft Translation marker parented to the spaceman
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Awesome !!! Thanks for sharing ! will play around this !
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Cool stuff. Just saw the new vid posted on LinkedIn. Was wondering how do we get convincing struggle from the spaceman? I find it hard to direct the becoming working on similar stuff. It’s hard to find a balance between animation and ragdoll.
For your example, how do we make the leg doing really intense kicking trying to break away from the tentacles?
Hi LaFed! Welcome to the forums!
Great questions, I’ve been playing with a tone of different workflows seeing which one works which doesn’t. I think I’ve landed on a good middle ground where I still have alot of control over the animation and posing, but let the simulation do all the hard work, I’m going to be upload some of those workflow videos very soon over here.
The big break through I had was to have the pose stiffness rather low to get a looseness to the sim and use some markers at the end of the the limbs to be helpers or supports .
I got into it a bit over here, but by doing this I know the leg will be where I want it to be in relation to the tentacle …
Here’s the vid LaFed was referencing
J
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This technique only works if you have
Translate Motion - Soft
This allows the Marker to translate.
Here’s a quick example showing how I can art direct the interaction of the alien moving back and forth toward the Spaceman… notice how the first part of the clip kinda looks right… this is due to the tentacles stretching causing the body to look like its moving back and forth… but we’re missing some of the moments I animated… by Reparenting the body of the alien to the chest of the Spaceman we now get all that animation preserved and it simulates as if it’s one structure- which makes sense as the alien is holding onto the spaceman .
I use this technique for putting props into hands that can be dropped or picked up …
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most synman thing ever
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Hi Jason, this is wonderful. Do you have a tutorial on how you setup the animations? Like controller where the end tentacles should go and attaching/detaching to the body? Thanks