How would I accomplish this outfit?

[nyanyanman]

What I want to do and am failing at finding a way to do is make my own naga/lamia look, really just for my own personal fun. I've checked out a couple inworld, the one has a tail that moves, leans forward and slithers and such, but the tail just sits there, it won't coil up or anything, while the other is a dozen or so tail forms that can be seen when it is clicked, and it moves between poses by toggling them, meaning bits tend to not disappear or appear.

What I want is to try to make a tail that will listen to commands and move, not just hide and show shapes, so then that way it can be animated to do other things or move different ways, in case I want to program a dance or new animations. I really want to make various length ones, of say 5m and 10m so that different oens cna be atatched depending on personal tastes, but I don't want a dozen hidden ones or just 10m of tail sticking out behind.

I want to be able to make the tail coil up around the avi when they aren't moving in a way that is somewhat believable, not just toggled.

I've worked with modeling and even animating objects before, just never for SL, nor have I scripted for SL, so I am really not sure how to do any of that. Do I make the tial of a bunch of prims and use an animating scripts? Could a tail be made of a rigged mesh that moves according to commands?

I am stuck at the starting gate and looking for advice, since I've never used these tools in this way, so any advice and tips would be extremely appreciated.

[Monti Messmer]

Animations can only be applied to bones. Because in SL you don´t have any bones left to use for the tail there is no chance of animating a rigged tail in the way you want.

Make a tail wrap around you as an animation, is in my opinion, impossible. You would need to script little bits attached to each other...

Because  there is no way knowing the tail is around your body or inside or way off it had to be made handish and remade for each new shape of avatar.

Ok, forget the word impossible ;-) but the work to do is way off what you would get as result.

Monti

[Qie Niangao]

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you don´t have any bones left to use for the tail

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On the other hand, these critters have no use for leg bones, so I can imagine it might be possible with some funky animations and some very funky rigging. It does seem like a tremendous amount of work for a one-off, but... I wonder if mesh merfolk avatars might be somewhere to start.

[Chosen Few]

I agree with Qie.  Because it happens that naga do not have legs, you can use the avatar's leg bones to animate the tail.  With creative use of joint offsets, there's actually quite a lot of capacity for animating a really convincing serpentine tail.  There are ten joints you can use, when you include both legs.

Take a look at the two figures below.  The one on the left is the avatar skeleton, in its default pose.  By  moving the leg bones, you can create the figure on the right.  That will give ten sections for your tail, which is plenty.  Create the right animations for it, and it should look great.

 

For a creature that has both legs and a tail, you'd have to sacrifice control of a limb, in order to control the tail.  You luck out with the naga, since it has no legs.

 

A friend of mine did something similar, a while back.  He made an angel, with really good flapping wings, by using the arm bones to control the wings.  The model's apparent arms were fixed in a praying position, leaving the actual arms free to be the wings.