Hi, I want to attach a weapon (axe, sword that sorta thing) to the hand of my character. What would you guys say is the best option?

- animating the weapon with the model and then seperating it (rather not 'cos this is more work, specially if I want to have more than one weapon)

- just attaching it and making sure it rotates with the hand (preferable, but only if it's gonna work properly)

The first option is my prefered option b/c its easier codewise. All you have to do in that instance is to code it to follow the player. It's origin has already been set in MED to be in the hand of the model when the two are put together.

Well if nobody has a convincing argument against animating weapons with the models, I guess that's what I'll be doing.

but its easyer to place a weapon on the hand at a certain vertex and point it to the direction between 2 vertices (on the hand)
..."convincing argument against animating weapons with the models"...I have one...if you have 2000 weapons in the game,what would you do? definitely wont animate them all.

one solution i found was to use a bone on the player hand. it's better than attaching it to a vertex because the bone also has direction, so you just set the weapon to the bone's position and direction. another good point is that you can get the bone by name, and not a number, so if you have more than one model that can be holding the weapon, you don't need to get the vertex number for each model, you just need that all of them have a bone with the same name...

Now that sounds like an intersting idea. What bone would it be though- the bone at the start of the fingers?

yes, if you have a bone for the character hand, you could make another one called 'weapon' from the hand bone,and attach the weapon to that bone...

I tried both vertex method , by the way see also AUM, and bone method to attach a weapon
The latter is better, in my opinion

go to acknex resourses unlimited, and go to wdls/dlls, download vattach, it works perfect, i used it with the guns in my game