2 Geomerge and Modeling questions things

I've only Geomerged a few times, but I am wondering how to geomerge a bow and arrow with animations to a footman for example. (that has archer animations)
Do I have to Geomerge the footman's body parts to the archer instead?
After spending a lot of time trying to manually transfer the bow and arrow etc.. I gave up on it and just put the bow there in a way I thought looked awesome. Then I remembered I'll use various bows anyway and thats why I have Q 2 added too.

Q 1: Above...
Q 2: Can I make an attachable bow that has animations? (of course the unit would need archer animations, synced frames? :x)

1. There's no nice automatic way to do this that I know of. You would have to
- Delete everything from the bow geoset of the archer except the bow.
- Copy that geoset into the footman.
- Copy the bones that the bow follows over, setting their parent reasonably and removing their animations.
- Transfer the archer's attack. It should transfer onto the bow bones as well as all the normal arms and legs and stuff.

2. Not that I know of. Your best chance would probably be to make the bow in two attachment pieces, one for the top and one for the bottom, and then animate those attachment points.

Sounds like a master plan. Thanks a lot Guesst.

I've come across a problem that is very disturbing.
1. I cut the head of a footman to put on another model(helm).
2. I make sure to put it at the bone: Box02: Bone_Head
3. It gets put on at 0,0,0 in the model instead of Bone_Head...
Geomerge only merge with coexisting geo-bones?

Info:
I am trying to find out how to make my helm(when used in ability) get placed correctly when I attach it to "head".
* When in wc3 it is almost correct, but it is of by about half the head.
* I don't know how or if I have to move bones.
* Or if there is a way to know where to put the helm when moving it with Vertex Modifier, like move the whole unit down then cut of the body, but I wont know how it will look on a model ingame when I have done that still.. I swear this is on of the many things that are making me crazy ;p


Tired brain in need of knowledge:
Q: Any program where you can attach a model to a bone without having to start wc3 all the time? just to fine tune models.. :\ Or a proper way to make unit-gear to eq would be nice. :)

Event - A random thought process (by unit Bowerbro) occurs.
Alternative for me is : Having a total of 40^40 models (65 items total, 25 not gfx.. I believe. not decided yet)
models(1.208925819614629174706176e+64 w/e that is, higher than a million atleast)... :p
Attachments working correct would reduce the number of models in file to 40^40 - 40^40 + 40 + 5 to 8(classes) ! ;p
I mean, I would have to get a insane hdd that doesn't exist yet and over 1000 years from now my 1000/75+10(10 possible accidents)th clone will still be making wc3 models. .. Unless the project is dropped by then.. ;p

As far as I know, you can't play a specific animation for attachments. You'll have to make one animated bow attachment and put it on the unit when it attacks (removing it after), and one unanimated bow for all the other animations.

I haven't done a geomerge in a long time, but if I remember right which bone you choose does not affect where on the model the head goes; only which bone it is rotated around by. So you would want to move it where you want to place it yourself.

For your helmet thing, you can either move the helmet's mesh to fix it or move the attachment point on whatever you're attaching to. I'd suggest moving the helmet's mesh. I don't know of any preview option for that outside the WE. But you can find the coordinate that it will attach to by looking at the head attachmentpoint in the MDL.

Nasrudin's method sounds most clever.

Clever indeed. I'll try doing this once I get to the part where I must code the archer spawns for map. My head is spinning since I stay up too long trying to map and fix models for my map and stuff like so.. Finally got harvesting working automatic. .. With a very simple code even, took some time to finalize it but it worked. It will be posted in another post later, I may move from thehelperforums to here because of the trigger function.

Trouble, like Bowzerbro always bring; here comes a quest for the knowing. Please help
I've stumbled upon a unrenderable model now though, and I tried quite a few things to fix it but nothing happens. It works in model editors and viewers, I tried reducing frames used to 1 (since they wont be animated) and tried finding if there were settings to hide the frames but found none... etc..
Please have a look. ~~

/B

There was a lot of strange stuff there... a material with four layers? O_o I couldn't understand it all, so I remade the whole thing instead.

It was resized to fit properly on a footman when attached to the chest using abilities. And had a custom skin.. which wasn't that special :p was just to remove alpha since I wasn't able to add new geo in vex edit. :x Well I dunno how ;p

Thanks (tried out)

Lovely m8, some tweaking and all is well ^^
+rep

Thanks for the wings and I managed to move them into correct possition.

I have modified the footman model more now and removed his shoulder pads and his boot color thingies, will put them back later since I remembered there is really no need to remove them I believe. Unless I'll have new models for the five pairs of shoes I will have later. Maybe I'll have to .. (meep; thought progress) ..make the footmen barefooted. Hehe
Anyhow, I just noticed that footmen have no bones for the left hand,
and I believe it isn't that easy to add new bones without using like gmax and IKtools. I may try just using the bones from villanger by merging together a footman using a villanger body.
Once I have got all the .. around 40-60 models;
5xEA of; axes, daggers, bows, swords, polearms
boots, helmets, gloves(oh yeah, will have to those footmen gloveless too I guess), and a possibility of actually making new armors for them
possible: amulets

I am likely to use some model packs which I will credit of course. :p All models collected will be put in a pack I'll probably call "footman action hero pack 3000 !!" since all models will be adapted to fit the footman.

I will make my own little thread where I will have all questions unless a mod or something can rename this one. :|