Blend Shapes - Eye blinking

According to my idea and storyboard my alien doesn't have much expression on her face (thankfully) but I did had to work with blend shapes to achieve the blinking of the eyes. It was probably at this moment that I regretted making so many eyes...
After a while and with the help of mudbox I managed to finish all the eye blinks and a little creepy smile that will appear at the en of the animation.

I haven't actually made the blenshapes at the point of the screen cap so the number of polygons in the scene was a bit alarming. I also made the blendshape for the eye of the inside of the spaceship.
Something that scared me later on was the arrange of the inputs; I thought I did something grown when I was trying to animate any blendshape, after having the alien in a different pose it would go back to the original T-pose. Luckily it was something really simple to fix by just putting the inputs on the right order.

Eye can see you

Most of the model I made it following a tutorial part of Digital Tutorials that a friend lend me. It was basically to build a female human body which then I modified  on mudbox to achieve an alien-ish look.
Part of this tutorial was the building of the eyes which obviously I just duplicated, scaled them and used them for the other extra 3 eyes on her forehead.

Old eyes with simple geometry

I was happy with them but one thing I really wanted to make was the pupils to dilate as that would add some creepy effect to the scene; also I've always thought that extreme closeups of the human eye look rather amazing!. Just as if I asked for it, a video came on my dashboard on tumblr of how to make really really cool eye with Maya and mudbox and it was only 12 min long, so I gave it a go despite the fact that I made the model fitting the previous eyes.

It was pretty easy and despite the fact that maya wouldn't take the texture I made in mudbox for some reason I ended up keeping this new eyes and work later on on their texture. Now, they don't look really special on the screen cap, but at least the pupil is animatable now.

Also, if anyone wants to give it a try to this tutorial, it's pretty easy and it has a good outcome:

Change of hair style

Something that was keeping me quite worried about the project was the "hair" of my alien.
The tentacle like that I had planned where turning out to be a problem for the kind of movement that I wanted to achieve.

On the render tests it was more than clear that they needed a lot of work. so I went up and made a skeleton to animate it. 

The way it was bending didn't get the kind of look that I wanted plus to get a decent animation by hand was going to be way to much work with probably poor results. 

I decided to go on another direction as the movement that I wanted was like a slow organic tentable movement as if they where under water or without gravity. So I experimented a little bit with dynamics. Now I havent played a lot with them so it was quite difficult to figure the values for mostly everything and even when I followed some tutorials I wasnt getting the results that I wanted, plus it was nearly impossible to see it real time so I had to be back rendering all the time to see the results. 

By the time I was at this point I noticed that this had already taken me out of my schedule to finish things on time, and that it was being more problematic than it was relevant. 

Despite the concept that I already had, I went on and changed for something more easy to handle, so with the help of mudbox I made this as the new "hair-style". My idea was to put a bone-like aureola behind it, but because of time constrains I'll have to see if I have time to add it later on.