levers

Hi Folks,
Any one know how to make a clenched hand(mouse map)lock onto a lever and pull it?
At the moment I use a hand with a pointing finger(right click to bring it onto the screen)and then on left click the finger bends down activating the object (button etc).
This is not very realistic when applied to a lever as it just goes from one position to another, much better if the pointing hand turned into a clenched hand(change mouse map)and attached itself to the lever. Moving the 'hand' would then drag the lever with it. Tried all sorts, but no luck so far, can any one help please?
yours in great hope! David (flavious)

ps. How does one get 'upgraded' from newbie to something a little higher? I must have been using 3DGS for about 5 years now and not too bad at it!

I assume you're familiar with 3D modeling and rudimentary animation export.
You make your 3D model of a mickey mouse hand or whatever and export it into your game as an entity. Hide the mouse cursor and use mouse_move to control the X & Y of your entity. Your lever is simply a button at first displaying a 2D bmap of a 3D lever rendered from your modeling program. While ( mouse button is clicked ) hide the button, as well as your entity, and unhide an animation of the 3D hand model wrapping around the lever and pause the animation there. The rest of the animation is of the hand pulling down the lever. Now the remaining animation frames are linked to the Y position of the mouse. When the mouse is unclicked, Hide the animation and unhide the hand entity again and it will snap back to normal, or if you want to get precise, trigger an animation of the hand model unclenching back to the neutral pose.
Of course you could do the same using all 2D animated entity frames as well; play a sequence of frames, while clicked jump to frame # X, play a few more frames and pause again. Scrub through remaining frames using Y_pos_when_clicked - Current_Y_pos

It's judged in post numbers -- i.e:

Many thanks to Dillinger and mehmaster for your prompt help, will certainly 'give it a go'.
I have seen this hand action on a lever in 'Myst-End of Ages',you can pull the lever all the way and it stays put,(and the 'action' takes place) or back and forth just a little, and it then snaps back to origin when released.
again, many thanks, David

@Mehmaster: You can get the title Chief Enginer? WoW!