Unable to find a beast race-compatible rig/armature for Blender

[JohnnyCena]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but here goes.

I've been trying to make some poses with the rig included with Animation Tools N3, the only issue is that it's missing the bones for the tails. I've tried to add in the bones myself, but every time I convert the zBoneKeys.txt that was exported with Blender, it detects the bones as unknown and they end up not being included. I've done a whole bunch of searching and I've yet to find any beast race-compatible rigs for Blender. There's one for 3DS Max, but I have no experience with that program.

 

Does anyone know where I can get one, preferably with an IK armature like the one Animation Tools N3 has?

[Blaze69]

I'm not exactly up to speed on the topic, but basically nobody looked into animating tails until b3lisario did so for SL anims quite some time ago, and even then it was swiftly forgotten and it was only when MadMansGun did some digging into it fairly recently for his own animations that we had any info on how to do it at all, so I don't expect there to be much about tails out there if anything at all. And yeah, so far I only know of it working with 3DS Max, but nothing about Blender.

 

I'm curious, though; since you want tail bones on your animation rig, would that mean you want to create poses/animations that include tail movement? And if so, what are you planning on doing? If I may ask. Tail placement in animations/poses in Skyrim slides between "minor inconvenience" or "I can get it to not look bad with a certain camera angle" all the way to "clips through everything and looks horrible", so anything that accounts for tails will be more than welcome.

[JohnnyCena]

Well, that's frustrating. You'd think someone would've come up with something by this point.

 

And yes, that's correct. I have an argonian character I'd like to do poses with, but I feel slightly limited since I'm unable to do anything with his tail unless I get into 3DS Max which, again, I have no experience with. I was originally going to put him in a sitting pose, but the tail went straight through the object he was sitting on and I had to scrap that idea. It's a problem even with standing poses since I want the tail to look "alive" instead of being limp, for the lack of a better word.

[wishnot4]

The tails are animated separately in game.  They have their own behavior and everything.  So, you should be able to use the vanilla beast skeleton imported into blender and just export the tail animations by themselves.  Then using the in game skeleton you should be able to convert them over.  I've never used blender for this just 3ds max, so not 100 percent on how it's done.