I’m making this model that is like a wounded dragon, and I want one of its main features to be its bony hand that flops around uselessly. Is there any way I could make the bone’s armatures move around in respect to the main mesh? I’m thinking something along the lines of what damped tracks do, but I don’t really know how to use those.
maybe this can help
also there is some bone physics add-ons that can help with that
So I did all of that, now my issue is connecting the hand armature to the body armature. Is there any way to connect bones together in a similar way you can parent objects to bones?
If the bones are within the same armature in edit mode of the armature select what you want to be child then what you want to be parent… Ctrl+P to parent
You will have yo choices
Keep offset: like parenting objects
Connected: the root of the child will be connected to the tail of the parent (one chain of bones).
If they are not the same armature select both armatures (i recommand selecting the hand first) Ctrl+J to join them as one armature then go with the previous step.
After my replies to you. YouTube just decided to suggest this video for me which is another way of doing that and i like this approach too:
Joining the armatures seems to have completely screwed up the model, any way to prevent this?
I also noticed I can’t move the hand armature around anymore for some reason
This can be due to the origin of the armature object.
If you know how to change the origin of an object (using the 3d cursor for ex) and make sure the hand origin is the same of the main armature before joining.
(It’s good practice to keep armature origin in the world origin while building your rig and just move the bones in edit mode)
Also make sure you apply the scale of the armature objects… scale at (1, 1, 1)
If the mesh does glitch it’s ok. Just delete the armature modifier of thr mesh and redo your skining again (parenting with weights)
I think the reason may be because the bones for the body and hand are different, the hand uses bendy bones, but the body uses octahedral bones, since I noticed that whenever one armature is joined with the other, it causes one armature to convert to the other’s type.
I highly doubt that’s the issue. You can can combine those tyoe of bones no issue at all.
Select both armatures without joining and share a screenshot (look at the origin dot )
When you join the bones of the first aramature become bones of the second and bones coordinates are relative to the armature object.
Apply all transform for both armatures and try to join again
Ctrl+A => apply all transforms
P.s: bendy bone is a parameter per bone not per armature.
Okay, so I tried a bunch of things out: Damped Tracks don’t really work for what I’m trying to use, since it makes the bony hand all stretchy and goofy. Second, I actually managed to join the armatures through some miracle of Blender. New issue however, the hand distorts whenever I try to use my IK to move the arm around. (Video shows what is happening)
Try wiggle2Addon.
Wind force field is available.
Because it is similar to simulation, the desired results may not come out. 
Quick update: I am really close to stabilizing the hand now, I just parented the constraints and start cubes to the bone. But for some reason the hand still insists on moving around with respect to the IK bone.
I think I may have solved my issue. First, I joined the hand and body mesh together using a boolean, cleaned up the new mesh, and used weight paints to stop the issue of the hand drifting around whenever I moved the arm. Second, I messed around with the settings of the Stretch constraints. And finally, I put a Limit Scale constraint on the bendy bones, and now the hand is very stable.