This is a personal project, i was inspired by the movie Pirates of the caribbean and started making
my own interpretation of Davy Jones, My goal is to animate a scene from the movie,
using realistic tentacle motion and convincing photorealistic renders, The tools i will use are:
3dsmax for the creation, texturing, riging, animation, lightining and rendering ; a video
camera to shoot some fire and smoke effects against blue screen and After effects to make
the final compositing.
here you can see the progrees how it goes so far. enjoy!!

click on the image to download the video (or rightclick and save target as)

   

Here is the Final image

i started the modeling with some basic skull shape,
the tentacles were modeled apart from the head, that
way i could duplicate them and give some randomness
to the geometry.

i always test the rigs before finishing the model, cause
in this stage i can make changes with no consecuences
and saves me a lot of time. i attached the first to "mustaches"
tentacles and tested their movements.

Here is the complete modeled mesh of the head with all the tentacles attached.
the color of the skin is not right at the moment, later i will adjust the hue of the
textures, to make them more yellow. the material was made using vray materials
the sub surface scattering effect was made rendering the same model with a
refractive material, and overimposing that refractive layer over the original image.

The hat with all the sea shells are now modeled, i just took picturesof some seashells i have at home, i model them extremly low poly
to maintain the scene running fast, then i scattered the shells over the hat, and aded some sea weed between them. now the model
is ready to enter the next stage : Rig. the hardest part will be to mixthe manual animation with the simulated animation. the tentacles must
react to the gravity, collitions , friction and interact with each otherkeeping in consideration the manual animation. at the moment i have
some ideas of how to achieve it, but i havent tested them yet.

Here i started the rigging sytem with muscles for the head and bones for the tentacles,  i didnt use blend shapes nor morphs,
because those modifiers dont work realtively to the actual position of the polygons, and tend to distort the mesh horribly when
i mix them

i will try to see if the spacewarps works with the manual animation over the tentacles, but my expectatives are not high with this method,
here is a screenshot of the wireframe of the model at the moment.

The layers are a great tool to keep organization on the scene, i ended up with more than 500 objects and bones
on the scene, still quite dificult to keep track in your mind of all the objects.

The modeling is almost done, at last i found some refrerences of the pipe.

Today i finished the buttons and controllers for the facial animation Here is the panel that drives the general animation,
its made from splines mainly.

Here is a sketch showing how the tentacles work , with a little video showing the manual animation system,
the movement of the tentacles are very tricky , thry twist, bend, curl, and change lenght, all that interacting
with each other respecting the collition, and acting under the influence of gravity, friction, weight and mass.
Click on the image to download the wuicktime file.

Another video showing some testsof the tentacles driven by  procedural animations,
And interacting between them. "tentacles playing with spheres"

Finally ! after 2 weeks of tests the manual animation is interacting with the physics simulation,
even there is some intersections going on, im happy with the results, click over the image to see
the quicktime movie.

A quick animation test with the dialog and the tentacles, some of them needs
more gravity .

Here are some of the passes i used for the skin shader. working with passes is
the best option to save time, and tweak the result in a non destructive way.

Here is the final animation , enjoy!! :D click over the image to see the quicktime video