I'd like to try designing an animation for an undulating worm that squeezes its body forward to move and stretches outward.
I could manually do this for each and every bone, but then this get's super complicated and might take literally weeks for a complex animation. So, is there a procedural way I can make bones contract in a delayed sequential way with respect to the velocity of the worm's head? Or is this something that I need scripting for? Maybe...drivers could somehow do it?
My first thought is just regular IK setup with the added checking of rotation on the IK Constraint. You could also use bendy bones to reduce the number of bones needed. Second thought is to use a Spline IK, but that is a little more involved. You could also manually set it up by creating the animation in an action and then use an action constraint on a single bone that way you can just animate the control bone when you want the inching animation.