The cat with 4 tails

Tail 1: spline ik tail

Add a bone, enlarge it to five 5 blender units. Then subdivide it until you get 5 bones in total. Name them tail.001 to tail.005

Add a bezier curve. In edit mode, position both control points. the first one at the start of the chain, which is the base of the tail.001 and the last one at the tip of tail.004. name it tailCurve.

Select once again the armature, go to pose mode. Select the tail.004 bone and add a spline IK
constraint, target it to the curve and change the chain lenght to 4.

Now change to edit mode, duplicate all the bones, change the bone layer and then erase tail.007 and tail.009.

Unparent these three new bones (with ALT+P and selecting Clear parent) and name them
CTLtail-start, -mid and -tip respectively.

Select the curve, go to edit mode. Select both points and subdivide once to get one middle control point.

Now add to them one empty hooking each point. to do that select the point wanted and press CTRL+H. Select add to new object. That new object always is an empty. Name them CTLtail-emptystart, mid and tip respectively.

Now those empties should be parented to the CTLtail bones. Select the tip empty then select the armature. At this point you can go to pose mode and then select the CTLtail-tip bone and press CTRL+P to parent. Be sure you select the bone option.Now that bone controls the empty which controls that part of the curve.

But the tail.005 doesn t follow any of the bones. To do that select the CTL bones and scale them with CTRL+ALT+S. This tool is named scale envelope/bone.

Now show all the bones. You ll notice how the original chain is squashed a little. That s normal. Before continue with the tail.005 rigging, remember to add 5 segments to each tail bone but the CTL ones. To change the segments, go to the bone properties and from there to the deform section. Also to the tail.005 reduce the ease out value to 0.00. This will provoke the tip to work better.

Now with these bones segmented, select the CTLtail-tip and Shift+ select the tail.005. Press CTRL+SHIFT+C to open the constraints menu and add a copy transformations to it.

What does this constraint do? Well, instead of having a constraint for each transformation the other bone can have (translate, rotate and scale) it is reduced to one constraint. As simple as that.

Happy blending!
See you in the next part.