a silly problem by a silly person

Basically I have a problem that I have been trying to solve since 2 days... I tryed everythink I could think of and I am running out of hairs (I rip them of my head when I am getting annoyed) anyway, here is my problem:

As you might now (or not), I am reproducing all of the Animation Mentor rigs for 3ds max. So far, I have done the ball and right now, I am working on the tailed ball. Here is how the "beta" looks like:



The ball has a squash and stretch controlled by a bone and the tail is attached to a single vertex of the outer rim (the selected one on the pic):



That way, I can do that and the tail will always stay aligned with the ball (I also linked the tip of the tail to the middle of the tail, and the middle of the tail to the first bit of the tail so that they stay together but I think you would have guessed that), here is an example:



I also linked the tip of the tail to the middle of the tail, and the middle of the tail to the first bit of the tail so that they stay together:

Now I can rotate every single bit of the tail, here is an example:



The problem with that is that it looks very chunky and I don't like that so I decided to use bend modifiers like so:



Now the problem is that the last two bits of the tail don't follow the first one. I know the previous sentence doesn't make much since so here is what I mean: I would like to get the same result as the following picture without having to move anything around:



I thought of a way to fix this: use the same method I used to attach the tail to the body, but here comes an other problem, if you look at the following picture, the last 2 bits of the tailed moved along with the bending of the first one, but I still have to rotate it to get it like on picture 6 and that's what I don't want to do, I just want it do don it on it's own., here is what I mean:



I think I know what to do, but I don't know how to do it. I think I would need to align the middle of the tail with the selected face on the picture:



If I am writing, and you know how to do it, could you tell me, and if I am wrong or you would know how to do this in an other way, could you also tell me.

Sorry for the long read, but thank you already for your time and I hope you could tell me how to do this.

As I said, this rig will be part of one for the free rigs I am making.
Thanks again for your time.
Richard Adenot

thx for the wonderfull help , problem solved

have a look at attachment constraints there

mark