Portrait editing not working

Thus far I have succesfully edited character models and seen them in the game. I just made the BM's sword longer, removed his beard and necklace etc. I copied the text between the two MDLs and reimported and all was gravy.

I tried to the same with a portrait model and it was a no go. In game the portrait looked horrible mucked up like my MDL swap of the coordinates went horribly wrong.

The thing is, when I am copying and pasting in notepad, the original portrait MDL layout is not the same as the edited one. For example I only need to go down TWO geoset finds in the original model before getting to the first spot where I should paste normals. In the edited model however, I must go down the normal THREE geoset finds. Also in the original MDL there is a lot of text referring to bone data and animation. I do not see this in the edited model.

I think then I am somehow copying and pasting the geosets into the wrong spots, and this is causing the model to look wrecked in game.

When I import the portait into 3ds should I leave bone data checked and not check static? Would this ensure on the export that both MDLs will be similar enough that I can copy paste the geosets without error?

Can anybody help me and confirm that the portrait MDX/MDL editing is different from the regular model editing?


Many thanks

As long as you are not adding or deleting vertices, you should not copy the Vertexgroups and Groups sections of the geosets. This will preserve the vertex wieghting and keep the animations from looking wrong.
I could be wrong, but I do not think there is any way to export bone wieghting with KMK's exporter, so you will not be able to change the number of vertices without a lot of text editing after the export.