Can ObiBone be elastic to hold its original shape?

[akqj10]

I tried the same thing with a dog tail, but the only way to get it to maintain the shape of a (paused) animation is a stiffness of 1, making it very stiff, and anything lower than that doesn't really work (behaves oddly or just has no effect).  It would be nice if bend constraints had an option to try to maintain the initial angle between particles instead of trying to maintain a straight line (what they do today).  Maybe that doesn't make sense for cloth since there would be tons of angles to try to maintain (each set of nearby particles), but it seems like it'd make sense for ropes.

I was initially trying to use this to get a dynamic dog/cat tail that I can also influence with animations, so it can act dynamically most of the time, then cue eg. a wag animation.  It sort of worked, but it was very floppy (unsurprisingly, very rope-like): the sim is being influenced by the animation, but retains a lot of ropey springiness on top of that.

I thought about trying the Maya approach and having three joint chains: one dynamic, one animated, and the final output chain (the one the mesh is actually skinned to) driven by a script that weights between the two sources, and updating the sim particles to also move towards the resulting state, so when the animation is turned off the sim state is close to where the animation was.

Guessing this isn't quite the right fit for this sort of sim, at least not today, but it's all tantalizingly close...

have you ever tried the unity plug-in called "dynamic bone" ?