Tail Forge - Plugins + Scripts -

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TAILFORGE
V1.0
Grow a tail. Or nine. Or become the serpent.
One plugin. No Unity, no Blender, no rigging, no keyframes.

Made for the VAM community, born from a request on my Discord

You know the old way. Model a tail in Blender. Rig it bone by bone. Export FBX. Build an AssetBundle in Unity 2018. Smuggle it into VAM through an invisible-clothing carrier. Then keyframe every little swing in Timeline. An evening of pipeline for one wag.

TailForge deletes all of it.

Add ONE plugin to a Person and a fully physical, fully customizable tail grows out of them — mesh, textures, physics and motion are all generated by code, live, right in front of you. Pick a preset, drag a few sliders, done. Your character has a tail that swings, collides, droops, wags and reacts like it grew there.

And it doesn't stop at tails.

12 PRESETS — ONE CLICK EACH
Every one a complete identity — shape, coat, colors, material and motion.

Same girl, same pose — just the presets and a couple of sliders (yes, the pom-pom chains are a slider).

CAT — sleek dark tail with a soft short coat, lazy sway.
FOX — orange brush with a white fluffy tip. The fox IS the fluff.
DEMON — long, whip-thin, glossy leather, classic spade tip.
DRAGON — thick, heavy, keeled scales with an oil-film sheen.
RED PANDA — chunky ringed plush. Instant cuteness.
WOLF — silver brush curving up over the back, long guard hairs.
CORGI — short perky stub with a brown tip, fast happy wag.
SNOW LEOPARD — long thick smoke-pale tail, charcoal rings.
KITSUNE — NINE white tails fanning out behind. Yes, nine. All physical, all fluffy, all swaying with their own rhythm.
SERPENT — a full lamia lower body: your character's legs vanish and a 3-meter snake body takes their place, scales, belly plates and all, slithering for real.
MERMAID — a fish tail with fine iridescent scales, a silver belly, diamond-dust sparkle and a big horizontal fluke. Swims with a dolphin wave.
OCTOPUS — eight tentacles under a mantle skirt. Ink-black with bronze tips, suckers on the undersides, writhing on its own.

Every preset is a starting point — change anything after.

BEYOND TAILS — LOWER-BODY FORMS

Serpent, Mermaid and Octopus don't sit ON your character — they REPLACE the lower body:

Built-in "hide lower body" — one toggle hides legs, feet and hips (and manages their colliders). No extra plugins needed.
A sculpted hip interface ("cowl") grows from the waist and blends the human half into the creature half — dialed to sit naturally on the body, adjustable for any morph.
Load in ANY pose. The attach system reads the skeleton's anatomy, not the world — kneeling, sitting, lying, it seats correctly.

Half girl, half legend, one plugin.

FULLY PROCEDURAL, PLUG & PLAY — ZERO CUA ASSETS

There is no mesh file. There is no texture folder. Everything is generated at runtime:

The body — a smooth skinned tube with five tip shapes (Point, Round, Spade, Tuft, Fluke), adjustable length, thickness, taper, curl, resolution — even a "beads" slider for pom-pom chains.
The skin — albedo, normal map, specular and gloss maps are all baked by code. Four pattern engines: Plain gradient, Snake scales (imbricate, keeled, with belly plates and saddle markings), Fish scales (fine crescent lattice with per-scale shimmer and a countershaded silver belly), and Octopus (papillae skin with double rows of suckers on the arm undersides).
The colors — base + tip pickers drive everything: gradients, ring bands (raccoon style), scale shimmer, markings.

Change a slider, watch it rebuild in a blink. No files were harmed.

REAL PHYSICS, BATTLE-TESTED

A proper joint chain with spring/damper control — stiffness from liquid-soft to muscular.
REAL collision with the floor and scene objects (long serpent bodies drape and drag along the ground properly).
A six-round-hardened anti-explosion system: drag your character around by the gizmo, use "Freeze Physics While Grabbing", teleport them across the scene — the tail rides along calmly and settles. It survives dancing. It survives everything we could throw at it.
Tail physics never fight the person: colliders are managed and re-exempted automatically, even when VAM regenerates them.

FUR & SCALES — CUSTOM SHADERS INCLUDED

TailForge ships its own shader bundle (auto-loaded, nothing to install):

FUR — multi-layer shell fur with soft wrap lighting (colored light wraps around the fluff instead of cutting a hard line), per-layer fade for a dense core and wispy edges, streak or speckle coat patterns, up to 32 layers.
SCALES — always-on normal mapping, per-pixel gloss, view-angle IRIDESCENCE and diamond-dust SPARKLE — the mermaid shimmer.
SNAKE SKIN — satin sheen with an oil-film rainbow that lives in the specular — the sunbeam-snake look.
POST-FRIENDLY — a dedicated depth-ghost system makes the fur play nice with PostMagic Depth of Field: the fluff blurs as one coherent volume instead of tearing into artifacts. (Two sliders let you tune how the fur sits in the depth of field.)

MOTION & PERFORMANCE — ZERO KEYFRAMES

Five motion modes: Still, Sway (lazy figure-8), Wag (happy dog), Slither (traveling S-wave along the body), Swim (vertical dolphin wave). Multi-tail forms get per-tail phase offsets — nine kitsune tails wave like a sea, eight tentacles writhe instead of marching.
TIP TRACKING — point the tail at ANY atom or controller: an Empty you animate in Timeline, your character's own hand, another person. The tail chases it with physics. A tail that performs, with zero keyframes.
Everything is a storable — presets, sliders and colors all save with your scene and can be driven by triggers.

HOW TO USE

Add the plugin to a Person atom: TailForge.cslist
A tail appears within a second. Open the plugin UI.
Pick a Style Preset. Dial colors and sliders to taste.
For Serpent / Mermaid / Octopus: the preset handles everything (including hiding the lower body). Use cowl height / flare and the offset sliders to fit the hip interface to your morph.
Optional: set a Track Atom + strength and watch it perform.

Load order, pose, scene — none of it matters. It just works.

HONEST NOTES & LIMITS
Up front about the edges, so nothing surprises you.

This is an appendage/body engine, not a Person replacement: the tail is physical and collides.
Performance scales with what you build: a single fluffy tail is cheap; the Octopus runs 72 rigidbodies and 8 chains — fine on a gaming rig, but keep an eye on it in heavy scenes.
Fur + Depth of Field is a fundamentally hard combination in Unity's old post stack. TailForge's depth-ghost handles it well, and you can always toggle fur depth ghost off for a dreamy soft-focus look instead.
Serpent-type bodies assume the scene floor is at ground level for their resting drape. On elevated platforms, expect to nudge.
If you resize the Person, hit Rebuild tail now once.

Found something weird? Want to request a tail type? Post in the discussion — this plugin grew up on user reports and it will keep growing on them.

What's new

v1.0

Initial release: 12 presets, 4 skin engines, 3 custom shaders + depth ghost, 5 motion modes, tip tracking, multi-tail (1-9), lower-body forms (Serpent / Mermaid / Octopus), full physics with anti-explosion suite.