METHOD 1: RAGDOLL WIZARD
In order to create a waggy tail attached to the dragon's body, I was recommended to use "Ragdoll". However, the difference is that I only wanted to ragdoll part of my model, which is the tail, so it is unconventional and I could not find any tutorials which somebody had tried it on only a part of the character before.
Moreover, when I separated the tail from the dragon's body and imported them into Unity, somehow Unity was interfered with the added mesh, which is the tail, that it could not configure my character correctly. So the solution is to go back to the model and connect the meshes altogether again.
The mysterious weird triangle mesh happened to appear from nowhere when imported the character and the tail separately.
METHOD 2: DYNAMIC BONE
When researching for another way to do the tail, I found this demo video using "Dynamic Bone"- a Unity asset which is dedicated to create the bouncy movements of selected body parts like breasts, tails, hair,... anything that follows after the body movements.
I watched a tutorial on how to use dynamic bone on a character's hair and applied these on my character's body structures.
This is the settings of the Dynamic Bone script that I initially applied on my dragon. I set the root to the Bone (which is the first bone in the dragon's bone hierarchy), therefore it will affect every joints below the bone (which is every part of the dragon's body). The result is quite funny, that is because I have not applied any exclusions, which are slots for the joints that I don't want any application of Dynamic Bone.
The second time, I applied exclusions on the left hand and right hand. And here comes the results, compared to the original dragon with no Dynamic Bone Script applied.
However, the Dynamic Bone could not apply on the tail of the dragon, because there were no joints connected to it. I have tried several ways to relocate the joints, stretching the spine to the whole dragon body from head to tail.
However, this method makes the movements of the dragon looks really stiff. It did not satisfy me, so I continued finding another way to make this works.
I decided to try creating another bone from the hips. By doing that, I simply just inserted more joints with the "hips" being the parents of the joints.
Looking from the side, the tail's joints align on the same line with the main bone, which causes the tails of the dragon to heavily being distorted. By rotating the main bone so it does not stay closed to the tail, the problem is fixed.
You can see that the tail, still no longer being distorted, still looks weird and not as nice as I expected it to be.
So this is the part that I am most proud of myself during the process of making this dragon's motion happens. By spending time playing with the Dynamic Bone script, I simply understood its nature. My final method was to apply a number of Dynamic Bone scripts to my Dragon, with each Script having the Root being each Joint in the dragon tail. It comes out nicely, which makes me so happy.
This is the version of each dragon, tested during my process. The right one is the beginning, and the left one is the final version which I came up with.
Comments