can someone help teach me how to do this

I'm making a caster hero that can "animate" weapons and armor and what not. I need to edit a model and remove the whole unit except for its weapon but keep all the animations so it looks like an invisible unit is carrying the sword or whatever and swinging it around and stuff. i tried to do this and i just deleted EVERYthing i could from the model that would still allow me to keep the weapon and i played the animations and it worked i got exactly what i wanted and i imported the model to the map and made a unit use that model and tested the map. it worked. you can see the sword moving around like an invisible unit is carrying it or something BUT when i go to exit the game, wc3 just freezes. sometimes i can alt+tab or ctrl+alt+delete to get out of wc3 and then shut it down from the desktop but sometimes i cant even do that and i have to hit the restart button on my computer. so cearly im doing something wrong. does anyone know how i can do this without problems? and i would like for someone to teach me so i can do it to any model i want without asking you guys to do every model for me

Try removing all the bones except for the helpers and the bone used by the weapon.

If there are no helpers, then take the bones you need and convert them into helpers. This could help out.

Also, what data did you removed?, it would also be nice to have the .mdl file.

If you removed most of the geometry, you're probably going to have a few GeosetAnims hanging around that refer either to non-existant geosets or -1; either case is bad. Magos' Model Editor is a convenient tool for checking this sort of thing; it should turn all non-references into "none"s; you can then go through all your geosetanims and delete those that reference nothing.

where do you get this magos' model editor i dont see it in the tools

-edit-
nevermind i found it under a different tools list...

and i didnt know know "magos' model editor" was the same thing as War3ModelEditor i already have that. that is what i used before.

i deleted the model that i was using and now im trying to do it again and i cant remember how to do it. i deleted the geosets that i didn't need but then im left with 1 geoset that has a weapon and a bunch of other crap in it too. so then i go to edit the model and i cant deletet he vertices that i dont need.

i'm a programmer not an artist i have no idea how to edit models.

ok i think i've come up with an easier solution to my problem. instead of editing out every model that has a weapon that i like, i think it would be much easier if i could just reskin a footman or something with a texture that is entirely transparent and use the weapon attachment model pack to attach the weapons i want.

but i don't know how to do it or if its even possible. can you reskin a footman or something to be completely transparent? (setting the unit to 100% transparency in the game does not work because attachments inherit the 100% transparency and you cannot see the weapons)