Research

After casually discussing my project with a friend who is studying animal biology, I've decided to research lizards. She explained to me that most lizard tails don't actually curl into a perfect spiral - only really the Chameleon can curl it's tail in such a way.

Now that I've begun researching this tail movement I've decided to focus my rig more on the gecko. Gecko's tails tend to flail when they're hunting, and additional movements tend to be swinging the tail ever so slightly side to side when the character walks. As far as a curl goes, I believe my rig still isn't quite correct and I may need to add in more joints to the tail to create a smoother curve. However I don't want to over-do it as my joint count is currently at 54 and I haven't yet added in the joints for the face. 72 is the max joint count for UDK for games so I'd like to keep my rig under this, meaning I have around 16 joints for the face and 2 more that I could add into my tail.

This would be: 2 in each eyebrow, 1 for each eye, 1 for each eyelid, 1 for each corner of the mouth, 1 for the upper lip, 1 for the lower lip, 1 for each cheek.

HOWEVER. Again. I've just noticed my mesh doesn't have eyelids. Or even a gap for eyes. Just two semi-sphere's stuck on the front of the face. And in fact the face in general doesn't have much geometry to work with. This either makes my job a lot easier, or a lot harder... I'm either going to have to find a different rig, or create the gaps for eyes myself and just accept the rest of the face as is. This day has turned out to be much more complicated than expected.