Been a while (but so worth it)

Rigging the tail was a very interesting challenge that seemingly no one knew how to answer. I ended up using multiple tutorials I found and combined them to get the result I was aiming for.

The tail wire is 45 joints give or take and animating all of them manually would be a complete time consuming nightmare. I posted on the Maya forums and was recommended trying IK Spline but I wasn't getting the effect I wanted because it wasn't allowing me to stretch out/condense the wire. I probably spent a day and a half searching for options before I came across this video for a Stretchy Spine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBxtDFdWBhw

This was perfect for getting the extension I needed, however I didn't have free control of the tail wire so that I could make it curve as well as rotate around to the front. I thought about it and remembered another tutorial I found prior to the one above and it gave control over the curvature but not the extension factor I ended up combining the two tutorials to finally get the result I wanted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldnBWWXHWYg

In the end I finally got it to work today (after redoing it because apparently a joint got rotated somehow and fixing that was causing the joint to lost the scaling ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) So now the tail is rigged and ready for animation and now I just need to move on to adding controllers to the legs since I actually already skinned them.