The incredibly simple and dumb way: spawning gameobjects onto a canvas in a set order, adding an image to the object, setting the sprite of that image to one of my cut out scales in a spritesheet, moving the offset at where they spawn at for x/y, finishing the row, and then doing it again with an offset y row, then resetting the origin of the 'printer' back to the left side. I mean, scales are actual things that overlap over an actual skin surface (which I could also texture, and many snakes have skin you can see between scales), and I can even take the edges of them and do additional shading if necessary... plus I can change materials of any scale or even paint over them with patterns on the canvas(especially if I make a neutral color scale set).
After that all I need to do is print the contents of the screen to a png file, which is done by waiting till the end of the frame, getting the bits of the screen to a Texture, then encoding the bytes to png and writing them out. (basically, from here:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Texture2D.EncodeToPNG.html , though I ripped out the dumb stuff and made a button that saves the contents for me when I want). Basically, the system I have right now can do the midsection of the body incredibly easy, but I'll need adjustment for the tail and a lot of individual work for the head (and I'm working on other stuff for a bit, be a few days before I go back to modeling).
Fun snake fact: "A snake hatches with a fixed number of scales. The scales do not increase in number as the snake matures nor do they reduce in number over time. The scales however grow larger in size and may change shape with each moult." - Wikipedia.