hierarchy of tags or who they're weighted to is of no real importance, only if it helps your animation (if you want the saber to come out of a certain bone, weight it to that bone, if you don't want the saber to be "allways" attached to that hand, make an extra bone and make it son of the hand (so you can pull it out often (tag_rhand_bone) ).

now, as for saber coming out of the model's middle, haven't really gonne through that, make sure you are loading a new map and spawning your model every time if you recompiled it (don't save the game with you model in it, there's something about index order of every object in a ghoul2model, seens during compilation random objects are assigned to diferent indexes, so every compilation, that order is made diferent, not a issue to be worried, that only affects saved games)

the other thing I can think of, is the pivot or your tags, are they centered to the tags themselves or the whole model's pivot? (found that to be a major issue on making new skeletons/animations), ghoul2models shouldn't really need "trifaced tags", actually, null objects(xsi) or helpers(on max) should be enough to define a tag's position or orientation (since what matters is the position and rotation OF the PIVOT), but it just won't compile if it doesn't have meshes(probably cuz carcass throws everything that doesn't have meshes in the gla, and everything that does, in the glm).

yet another update concerning how things work...

eh, here's what I did to figure out why Bahamut wouldn't execute simple attacks:
made a copy of the _humanoid.gla for another model and asigned that new gla as its skeleton & animation index, then started deleting blocks of animations from it's animation.cfg untill I'd reduce it's status to that of Bahamut (no attacks) in other to find wich animations were needed before the attack animation, (in other to trigger it). (weeeeee, I'm so clever!! xD )

seens the game still requires the animations of the first(normal/yellow) stance even if you don't use them, perhappes that has something to do with codding, like: the attack/damaged is triggered on the normal/yellow attack animations, and the animations of other stances use code from normal/yellow and what really changes is only the motion/animation alone, kinda makes sense, I mean, why would you trigger that for each animation on the game's code when you can make it in only one, and the rest is just modified animations (therefor shorter code). I'm really just assuming it, but wth, works for me ;3

to answer your question about animation sequences:

no, they don't have to be in a specific order (however if i remember correctly, the first frame of each animation for jka was set in the "root" pose). the reason being, there is another file which tells the engine that when the "run" command is activated, it starts animation at frame number x, and ends at y.

it is, however, usually easier for the animator to make batches of animations. usually they will do idle poses together, then crouch, then walk, then run, then crawl etc.
i guess it's just easier for them to string the animations together.

Create two models, one with the humanoid skeleton and another with his own skeleton.

For tips on how weighing wings to humanoid skeletons, check this model:

Howler, Jedi Knight 3 Downloads, Jedi Knight 3 Others

^^^emmm... that model its weighted to the humanoid skelleton. Believe me, I made it.

Re: The man with the Machine gun
 

so when this is done, what would it be called, Bahamut?
seems preety simple enough, and this is a damned impressive model, not something you'd expect to see in JKA
allI know is that I want, this is my 2nd favorite Bahamut next to the Crisis Core version (originally FFVII)

Re: The man with the Machine gun
 

What ever happened to the man with the machine gun model? it was looking really good then just stopped. i would like to see this model continue.

Re: The man with the Machine gun
 

ya.. i'd have to agree on that to be honest. i was looking forward to a laguna model too :P

Re: The man with the Machine gun
 

I agree it didn't look bad, actually very accurate, but I'm not doubting that they'll continue it after Bahamut is done

Re: The man with the Machine gun