Rigging Help! Trying to use squash and stretch with aiming on an Among Us bean.

Tageleo

Hi, Junior Artist taking his first steps to advance rigging here.

...To sum up everything I'm trying to rig a squash n stretch BEAN of a character; but this lil guy has this tongue that stabs and I'm struggling to think of a way to have both a squash and stretch with a tongue that'll accurately extend to where the aim is...

...I am using an IK spline handle for my spine and that's where I'm connecting the "mouth"...

I'm also aiming to go into game development so making this as a functioning game asset is also my goal.

My scene pretty much has a rig with a proxy model. This proxy model is just a cylinder with squash n stretch all working fine; little details that move around like astronaut flaps n such I can just use blend shapes. However...
 
This Bean also has this super sharp tongue that needs to accurately stab at a point... Rigging everything else feels very straight forward and I've gotten as far as that. RN I currently have Rig that deforms and looks all cartoony but what I need to add is a tongue that not only goes with that cartoony squash n stretch but to be able to be aimed at a point.

Here is my current progress:


Concept Art from ArtsyYellow (LINK)

throttlekitty

I don't know what you need the tongue to do when it's not being pointy. Does it need to transition from like a floppy dog tongue into the pointed one, or can you get away with a model swap? IK Spline should already do what you want for aiming a spiky tongue. A feature to disable the S&S should be as easy as mixing in a multiply node into that node chain.

Alternatively, if you had a FK/IK setup, FK could have the first joint aiming at a target controller, which can increase the distance of the other FK joints, basically stretch but without modifying scale; maybe just let a blendShape handle that?