These are animations I did for the film - "Kraken - Tentacles of the Deep"... so original name..hah! Despite the overal look of the film /although I was Lead Artist 
on the film hihi, there wasn`t enough time to polish everything like I wanted/ 
there are some quite nice in my opinion shots. The closing shot for example, which was 1211 frames. I was responsible for everything in the shot - from the modeling of the little squids, to texturing and 
shading them,to rigging and animating them .. to lighting, rendering. The compositing was done by Sasho Valev, who was also supervisor of the film. 

    Sooo... for the tracking I used Matchmover. For the modeling, texturing/shading, and everything else, I used Lightwave3d. The rigging and animation was half procedural, half -keyframed.  The wings at the sides of the squids were procedural. Basically you move a locator , and  everything else is animated realtime. The tentacles were keyframed.  Compositing - in Fusion. Done in several passes - mainlight, diffuse, amb occlusion, specular and sss pass. 

Final Shot - QuicktimeSorenson3 960x540(14mb)

Test of the Shader - QT Sorenson3 960x540(600kb)

The shots can also be seen at  my CG-Portfolio and in my Gallery here.

Thanks for watching! 

Ok, for the riggers out there, this would be interesting. This is a plugin developed by Michael Hutchinson . What it does is making a new IK solver - elastikSolver , that has:

• Auto-stretch
• Adjustable smooth stretch
• Interactive elbow/knee manipulation
• Hyper extension

• Auto-stretch
• Dependable twist
• Curve sliding
  

It`s nice because it does it with a single node, so you no longer need to use multiply/divide nodes for creating this.

Also I`m thinking using it on my character setups for my short.