As you can see, my animation isn't showing and instead it shows me a translated and rotated version of the default arms pose.
What I tried:
1. Check the bones match - they do. To make sure it's nothing to do with this, I opened up the exported SMD and pasted in the default mesh's bone data. Still this problem.
2. Exported the animation is a regular prop. So in other words, I exported my animation with the mesh in max as a reference SMD, did the physbox thing, exported the squence without the mesh - works perfectly fine as a generic prop.
3. To be completely sure it's nothing to do with bone linkage or naming, I improted the decompiled arms, didn't change anything, made a small shoulder rotation animation, export, compile - yada. Still exactly the same issue.
4. Copy pasted the idle pose and renamed them to fire, reload, draw, etc. to make sure it's not happening because I haven't got all ACTs satisfied.
5. Extracted the default c_spy_arms.MDL and placed it in models/weapons/c_models. Nothing.
6. Tried opening the decompiled animations (which are fucked up, cannonfodder's decompiler breaks them) and simply pasted in the bone coordinate data for each frame. Still nothing.
and so on. I did some other things which I can't recall anymore. The point stands, no matter what I do, it just doesn't fucking work.
Which brings me to the question - can default Valve's mesh files that via $includemodel refer to a separate animation file use a custom replacement for that animation file? I know it can work in reverse, you can make a custom mesh and tell it to use Valve's default animation files.
I am guessing it would work if I recompiled the arms mesh with $includemodel referring to a custom animation file like c_spy_animations_custom, but I want to make sure there's no way (or there is) to simply make a custom animations file and have the mesh file in the GCF archive use that file instead. I am potentially releasing this model, and I want to submit it to Valve.
