Snakes that looked like a bag of shapes until Catmull-Rom saved them

The snakes had heads, fangs, eyes, a forked tongue — and still didn't look like snakes. First pass: individual spheres strung together. Hard to distinguish from the cabin environment, hard to tell they were even reptiles. Second pass: viper skulls, belly scutes, hood geometry, two-tone coloring. Better anatomy, but now they looked like a parts catalog — a head here, a body segment there, all floating in the same general area. The fix took a completely different approach: throw away all the individual meshes and rebuild each snake as a single continuous CatmullRomCurve3 spline tube with procedural UV-mapped scale textures. Every vertebra follows the same smooth curve. The dorsal and ventral coloring wraps seamlessly around the tube cross-section. The tongue, fangs, and hood attach to the head control point, not as separate floating objects. 687 lines of Snake.ts to get a 3D reptile that actually slithers instead of jittering as a collection of disconnected geometry. Two rounds of "definitely an improvement, but..." before landing on the approach that worked.