HumanIK requires you model quadrupeds in a human style T pose, which wasn't going to work so well so I didn't try to use it this time. Instead, I used a free script from Brave Rabbit. It helped with most of the process which sped things up quite a bit. I had a couple issues with it, mostly to do with scale. It ended up being best to scale up the model to the rig and then scale it back down after the rig was finished rather then use the script's menu scale attribute.
I added my own bit to animate the jaw opening and closing. As well as making a move-able tongue. The jaw just involved added some joints to the rig. The nurbs curve acts as a controller via a simple expression on the rotation.
The tongue was inspired by a brief teaching experience with Andrew Chesworth who now works at Disney. It was a couple of years ago but I remembered he had shown me a rig he made with a tongue that had unconnected joints skinned to it. I can't remember much more about it, but I thought I'd give it a go. I grouped the joints under zeroed out locators and grouped the locators under the jaw controller. That way the joints wouldn't connect to each other, but would move with the jaw and I wouldn't have to mess with the pre-made rig more. The locators act as controllers and leave the tongue and the bottom of the mouth in their default position. And I have the back end of the tongue skinned to the a jaw joint so it always stays rooted to the mouth.
I used the same process with a wolf as well.
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