Some character have non-standard bones, e.g. a rigged hair. When we convert such a rig to Rigify, the rigified rig contains those bones, but they may be inconvenient to pose individually.
Here we have a figure with a rigged ponytail. The ponytail bones belong to the Custom collection.,
And here the rig has been converted to Rigify, with the hair bones still in the Custom collection. Posing each of hair bone individually can be done but is inconvenient.There are a few things that we can do to make it easier to pose the ponytail.
We can
Add IK Goals. This tool is located in the Rigging > Chains panel which requires that the Rigging Tools feature is enabled.
However, Rigify is a modular rigging system and we may want to use some of the Rigify types. Previously that has not been so easy to do. In principle we can first generate the metarig, then add the custom bones to it, and finally rigify the modified metarig. However, that requires further postprocessing because the vertex groups must be renamed. In the last version of the DAZ Importer there is a much simpler way. Just select a bone in the original DAZ rig and add a Rigify type to it.
Let us give the ponytail the control of a basic Rigify tail. Select the bone that we want to be the root of the tail, and assign a suitable Rigify type to it. Here we choose spines.basic_tail.
The Rigify Type panel contains various option for the bone chain. By default a basic tail can only bend along the X axis.
Once a bone has been assigned a Rigify type, it is added to the metarig together with its descendants. Any parent bones that are not part of the standard Rigify armature are also added.
Now the rigified armature has a ponytail with the extra control bones.
The entire ponytail can now be posed by rotating the target bone at the end of chain.
