@Turambar87,
Don't ever mess with the weapons/shield bones; nothing good will ever come of it.
This was a non-starter for CA for M2TW, it was never fully implemented. It is still
in the .exe but it never works correctly. Weapons for the right hand should only be
assigned to bone_Rhand, same for shields, only to bone_Lhand. Even mentioning
bone_weapon_weapon01 (not an actual bone, but Grumpy's shorthand for a composite
bone) means you are mixing Grumpy's converter with the importer to Max; that's never
going to work. Just take it as a writ of CA law; there are only 20 bones in M2TW that
you can assign to; none of them have weapon or shield in them. As long as you
follow those rules, the bone assignments made in Max SHOULD (I've heard where this doesn't
happen) carry back to the .mesh file.
Technically, here's the deal:
You get 20 bones that define the skeleton. Then in the .mesh file you get 6 six more.
They're called:
bone_weapon
bone_weapon01
bone_weapon02
bone_weapon03
bone_shield01
bone_shield
(May have got them out of order, too lazy to check.) These all have assignment indices after
them in the .mesh file, not all unique. So Grumpy said, "this is silly, I'll just make some names for
these that just use the unique indices". So that's why Grumpy's converter only has three
extra bones: bone_weapon, bone_weapon_weapon01, and bone_shield_weapon, or something like
that. But this is all stuff and nonsense, none of this works correctly so we were drawn off on
a meaningless tangent that doesn't work in game. The converters just stick the 6 weapon/shield
bones back in and (if you don't assign to them) nothing bad happens in game.
If you are making custom skeletons, then all bets are off. Use the utilities provided, they always
move the weapon/shield bones after any new bones added so it still works. Do a search
on Bwian/King Kong/JMRC to find tuts on how to make models with extra bones. This is actually
really fun stuff so I'd encourage any attempts to try things with new bones. To my knowledge,
I've never seen anyone make a unit fly; I'd love to see someone make a Nazgul on a winged
prehistoric steed. Anyone? anyone?