Frank Spalteholz

Hi!
I need to rig a tail for a creature that needs a bit more control than a simple fk chain. Coming from Maya I'd like to define a custom spline-curve where the cv's are getting closer and closer towards the end of the tail. I'd then create a spline-ik that controls my bind-joint-chain. I'd then put a fk-control-chain on top by simply skinning the cv's to those extra fk-joints.
The default apex-rig-component only lets me create 4 controls (root, rootcv, tipcv and tip) and they are equally spaced. So my first question would be if there is a way using apex script (which I'm familiar of on a beginner-level) to "break" the standard-spline-ik so that I can pipe my own spline-curve in? (I know that H21 has some new spline-ik-component, but I have to stick with H20.5)
Thank you very much!

Wow William. I'd never expected such a well documented and clean how-to-file. You've spent so much time on it, I feel a bit of bad now cos I can't buy you a beer or a tea. Thanks so much. On another prototype I was thinking on how to create an Auto-Rigger conceptually and was starting by adding a couple of dictionaries to the point 0 in the guide-skel-stream that its only role would be acting as a "global rig dictionary" for the first build-process (and maybe later too) if you will. So my intuition on that was right, but having now a clean example on how to read this out + promoting/porting variables over to other snippets speeds up the learning process by a lot.

Thank you so much, William. I'll report later if I could adapt/follow your changes. This forum is amazing. It's so supportive compared to others.