Hi gang,
I’m using MB7 and I was just wondering how you guys set up your characters that have tails for use in IK chains?
There aren’t any places to put tails in the list of required names.
I tried adding them to the spine but that didin’t work. It just screwwed up the neck joints.
I downloaded a quadraped example from the Alias web site. But it doesn’t use the tail bones in the IK chain. They are only accessable through FK.
Is there a way to add tail bones to an IK rig?
Hmmm,
I see people looking. But not replying.
Does this mean it’s a stupid question? Or is it something people don’t know how to do?
If the case is the latter. Then I’ll share what I’ve learned so far:
The manual says to make a character extension for extra body parts like tails.
The manual has a guide on doing that. And it seemed to give me an IK controlled tail skeleton like what I wanted.
However. I noticed that simply dropping the “SimpleIK” from the constraints library on to the tail and setting the start and end of the IK with the first and last tail bone works just as well as a character extension. But with a lot less work.
I’m not sure why using a full blown extension is recommended.
But I’m still very new with MB and I’m still learning how and why things work.
maybe you should retitle this. " how do you rig a tail"
How I would do it is rig the tail with bones usually the tail could have more or less bones depending on how you intend to animate it but lets just say for example you put 7 bones in the tail.
what I would do then is add an IK spline from the root of the tail to the end.
the ik spline has a built in spline within it (check the outliner). and you know splines have cv’s right? ok so then you can attach a cluster to each of those cv’s. moving the cv’s around will animate the tail.
OR
just rig the tail with bones like above and dont do anything else. Select all the tail joints and make a quick selection set out of them and then you could create a simple swag by rotating all those joints at the same time. much more tedious but a little less complex than the one above.
hope this helps.
The only problem with this is MotionBuilder doesn’t have an IK spline. 
From what I understand, the difference between a character extension and just doing your own constraint is that if it’s a character extension it will be included in full body mode keying. So either method will give you what you want (assuming you want IK control) but since I don’t like keying in full body mode, I’d just set up my own constraints because it’s easier.
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