Character bending - catipillar animation

Hello All, I've always been curious about this and hope to find a realistic and effective way on how to animate characters that morph to the terrain/path

Example would be a caterpillar, snake, snail, slug or a worm

you know the way long bodied creatures would walk and bend to the terrain?
I imagine a snake maybe harder but I'm talking more like the worm in Penumbra but dynamically calculated with some sort of flow system

but there has to be a way to layer animations combined with physic based anchor points.
The reason why is I'm building an RTS game that has giant exploding caterpillars and I'd like them to bend over the terrain as they wriggled and crawl, that includes bending left and right and walking up and down ramps/stairs

Much help is appreciated, I have looked for answers before on here and Google but I got guides on how to model and standard animations

D