 So you guys really liked this kind of tutorial and you wanted to see the process for a slightly more complicated character that included custom bone shapes and possibly reverse jointed. Not a problem. Luckily for you guys I happen to have exactly that kind of character ready. So let's do this. For starters, let's turn all the armor off so we can only see the body we need to weight paint. We'll talk about the tail later but for now shift A, armature and move the root bone where the bottom of the pelvis would be. Then press E to extrude two more bones to complete the spine. Right click the middle and press E to extrude one more bone to make the controller for the spine IK handle. Continue to extrude and make some neck and head bones. They don't need to be connected and detach one more bone to create the tail control. From here we'll extrude another bone to start the leg. A trick that I like to do is make one big bone, move it into place, then right click and subdivide it into smaller joints as needed. And as usual we'll extrude an IK control bone at the bottom that should have no parent and we'll do that again to make the pull target for the knee. Then we'll do the exact same process for the arms and on the hand make an extra bone in the same place for the arm IK. And as usual don't forget to make the elbow IK for the extra control. Awesome! Now that pretty much completes the skeleton so now we have to go through and name all the bones. Don't forget that we're going to be mirroring the left and right side over to each other so remember to add the words left and right to any bones that need to be mirrored. Once everything is named go ahead and check to make sure that the arms and elbow IKs are parented to the top of the spine and the legs and knee IKs are parented to the bottom of the spine. Then select all the bones that you want to mirror, right click, symmetries. Awesome! Now we just have to add IKs to the arm and the legs, click the handle, shift click the shin, shift I and assign the correct knee pull target. And our legs have two bones so we'll set chain length to two. If you see the leg bend in a weird angle like this it usually means you need to set the pull angle to something like 90 or negative 90. 90 seemed to work for us and now you can see that the knee IK controls the angle while the foot IK controls the leg. Repeat this exact same process for the other leg and when you get to the arm it's the exact same drill. Click the IK handle, shift click the forearm, shift I, assign the pull target and again if the angle is a little weird change the pull angle. Also something I'd like to point out is you can actually add all the IK stuff to your arms and legs before you symmetries. I just thought it would be easier for you to understand to see it all done step by step but when you do this for real just do the IK stuff first and then symmetries it. Okay now all the IK controls should be working fine except for the last one which is the spine. So click the IK handle, shift click the middle spine, shift I, then we go back over here and make sure that chain length is set to one. Awesome, now we can control the top of the spine with this IK bone. But the rotation is a little bit off so to fix that click the IK, shift click the top of the spine bone and press control, shift, C and R. This will make the top spine bone copy the rotation of the IK bone. And we're going to repeat the process for the hand bones because we also want the hands to copy the rotation of the hand IKs. Okay so the hard part is over, the rig works and now we just have to weight paint the body to the rig. The wings on my character aren't really going to move so I'm just going to parent them to the top of the spine, then I'm just going to parent the head to the head bone, then we're going to click the hips and auto-paint them to the rig, then click the shins and auto-paint those to the rig. Alright, looks good. So finally we'll auto-paint the main body to the rig. Now the weight painting is pretty much done but you can see that there's some weird stuff going on here. Like when I moved the arm the hips shouldn't be affected but they seem to be connected somehow. So to fix that we'll click the rig, shift click the hips and go to weight paint mode, make sure auto-normalize is on, check mirror X, X and topology mirror. Control click the hip bone and just make sure that the weird parts are completely red so that they only move with the hip bone. Okay, now the topology mirror should have mirrored our paint job to the other side automatically. And if we check it out, looks like it worked. That was really the only weird part the auto-weight paint didn't catch. So if we test the rest of it, looks like it moves around pretty good. You can perfect it later if you find things you don't like. But it looks good to me so now we just parent all the armor to the proper bone. So the tail should be parented to the tail bone, the guns should each be parented to the corresponded hand bones, shoulder pads should be parented to the spine, or you can do the biceps, depends on what kind of look you're going for. The core armor should be parented to the top of the spine and that should be everything. The whole body and armor pieces now properly move with the rig. And as usual our next step is to separate the control bones onto a different layer for animating. So shift click all the bones that aren't needed for animation, press M and move them to the second layer. This makes it much easier to see the bones, to see necessary bones and will save a lot of time when animating. And the natural next step is to color code them. So go to the groups and we will make three groups, red for right, green for left and yellow for middle. And as usual to assign a color, just select all the bones and click assign. You'll do this for the green side, the red side and the middle. From here I usually turn bone mode to stick just to see things a little easier and you guys wanted to see how to use custom bone shapes so I'll go ahead and show you. Let's say you made a custom bone shape and you want your bones to look like this shape. Well, in order to do that, just go to bones mode, go to the bone and down under custom object, find the name of the object that you want it to look like and bam, it's that simple. You can do this for any bone you want and this is why you see everyone's rig looking different. They're just using their own bone shapes. Okay, now for whatever reason most reverse joint type characters have tails. Not sure why, but if you're doing reverse joint then odds are your character has a tail. So I'll show you a little trick that I like to use whenever I'm making cool dynamic looking tails. This works best for machines and aliens but you can apply it to whatever you want. Start with whatever base shape you wanna use for the tail. Then control A to apply all transformations and make sure it's in the middle of the world. Then shift A, add a curve, then click your object and add an array modifier. Set type to fit to curve and the curve should be set to your curve. Make sure the offset is set to zero for everything except for Z which should be set to one. Check merge to true, then add a curve modifier, set the curve to your curve, set deform access to Z, then click your object, shift click your curve and move it where it needs to go. At this point if you tab the curve to edit mode you can drag and rotate the ends to whatever shape you need. In the curve edit mode you can press Alt S to change the size of each end and you can rotate the handles with R or press control T to get a cool looking twist design. Once you got all the shapes you want you can change the offset to effect the number of times you want it to repeat and finally you wanna be able to control the curve with your rig. So to attach a curve to a bone go to pose mode, click the bone you wanna attach it to, then go to object mode, shift click the curve, click the point you want and control H to hook it to your selected bone. Awesome, now the tail bone controls the tip of the tail but we also wanna repeat the process to attach the other side of the tail to the body, specifically the lowest spine bone. And well, you're done. Sorry if that was a little long but that was the entire rigging process for this reverse joint tailed character. I really hope that helped. If you thought this kind of rigging tutorial was useful and you'd like to see a slightly more complicated character, maybe one that even requires a feet and toe rig leave a comment down below. Otherwise, as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.