Organic tentacle growth

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m a newcomer to Blender animation, and have found plenty of tutorials for character animation etc. What I need to do is a bit different, however: I need to animate two tentacles / pseudopods that grow together to become a single object. It isn’t clear to me at this point what would be the best approach to doing that.

One further possible constraint: the tentacles will have semi-translucent surfaces (which reveal glowing particle systems in the interior). This means that when they merge together, they need to genuinely merge – ie, they can’t have internal geometry which is obscured by an opaque surface.

With that in mind, can anyone recommend some tutorials etc. which might shed some light on the best way to do this?

2

Have you tried meta balls?

3

Looks like metaballs are indeed a great way to do this! I’ll post the results here when I have some. One problem with this approach, however, is that it doesn’t seem possible to make metaballs a container for a particle system. Still trying to figure out that one; may need to create an invisible non-metaball particle container that grows alongs the metaball tentacle.