Sorry I'm late...
But I have a few things to point out in Sephiroth's rig. And normals. idk why the normals look bad, i guess max does such a bad job rendering them that i didnt notice it, testing it in-game the normals only have issues on extreme lighting but it is still the first fix that needs to be done, im guessing it messed up when i smoothed him extremely so there idk why the wrist does that, i thought i fixed it but it is an easy fix, the neck looks a lot better, the rig for it is perfect, its just bone alignment that needs adjustment.
Im going to be honest, i did not have any sort of desire to make a v3. But with the pointed out issues, it needs to be done. But not any time soon, he got maybe 10-20 Dls yesterday when i expected a good 100-200. Plus i have several other projects at hand that need to be finished.
it's not so much that the bones need to be completely unused, it's more that you won't be rigging them to the new model.
so for example, you could easily use Ness's Mouth bones, CapJ, RWaistNb and LWaistNb, and probably even the WaistNb for the tail. that's 7 bones that you could use for the tail. and if you want some movement for it, after you position the bones, you can rename them to match other bones, like the LArmJ for example, and it'll use the same rotations and stuff but applied to the tail.
and if you need any help with the bone edits, i'd be happy to help. bone edits can be a bit tricky sometimes.
Thanks for explaining a lot of that, this will help a lot. I have a couple quesions though...
So if we are using something like rshoulderjb to replace rshouldern to move the arm bones into his body some, we delete the original rshouldern and after making rshoulderjb the new parent rename it to rshouldern?
Also, we move the bones using xtranslations will moving any of the children that have a new bone as a parent mess up anything?
Lastly if i were to rename one of the tail bones rarmj and i still had rarmj in effect there would be nothing wrong?