Substance Study - Thing of the Deep

This one was a real challenge and super fun. I spent a bit longer than I would have liked to working out the animation and getting everything to blend in a way that was convincing (I say convincing because it's far from perfect!) but in the end I'm happy with the result.
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I was very inspired by Eric Wiley's Tentacle tutorial and saw the opportunity to tackle the challenge of animating it and putting my spin on it.
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To avoid having the albedo and roughness textures slide around over top of the animation I had to pass masks through from the sub graphs all the way up through to the master. This put a pretty serious limitation on how much detail I could put into the channels and still have the graph light enough to animate. To solve for this, I passed as much detail through the height as I could and squeezed as many maps into channels of RGBA textures as possible. I had to pull probably every optimisation trick I know to get this done.
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Having a proper iridescent shader was important as well. I ended up using a half-vector specular mask as well as Alan Zucconi's excellent paper on iridescence to figure out generating the ramp. This helped a ton by adding a bunch of interest detail that I couldn't get in the the texture itself.
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I am putting together some more detailed breakdowns and WIP stuff that I'll post when I get a chance!