How to make bones follow each other instead of individually?

Question

Now i know this may sound weird but I am wondering if there is a way to make bones follow each other once subdivided. E.g. the last bone to bend with the others before it. The reasom behind this is im wanting to do a creature that has tentacles coming out of a mouth that is a hole (sort of like how HL:2 has those barnacles on the cieling - only thing i can compare to). I want these tentacles to be sparatic and flailing in the air much like how some flood forms are seen in Halo Wars 2.

Or if there is another way or tutorials out there you guys can help me with. I have used 3DS And maya and they have different IK solvers for this like when moving the hand of a character the arm will follow etc.

Thanks guys, im really wanting to learn how these AAA studios did these advanced models.

Answer 1

I agree with Frederik's comment on your original post, using either the spline IK or bendy bones would be how I would approach the problem if you wanted to have animation control over the tentacles. For the flailing, you could parent the IK targets to empties that are randomly animated using noise/sinusoidal modifier on the animation curves or the "wiggle" feature in animation nodes.

Another way to approach it if you don't care about being able to pose the tentacles could be to use cloth physics for each arm as is done for a rope in this post: How To Simulate a Rope. You could use hooks as is done in the tutorial, or alternatively use a wind and turbulence force field on the "ropes" to get them to wiggle randomly. In the example below, i used the skin modifier on the cloth "string" to give the tentacles some mass and a subsurf modifier, then duplicated the objects around the hole. The wind and turbulence fields give them the "wiggle". Of course this is just one suggestion. You could combine methods and have one or two you animate and the others random. Hope this is helpful?