there is a problem wherein if i want to change weapons in game from example, the stock uzi to something in BSP's modern weapons pack the textures and models of the hands are changing. Will restructing the hand models in blender cause a corruption in the animations? What is the least painful way of resolving this? Ideas please...

As the weapon is rigged to the hands, yes restructuring the hands with out un parenting the mesh from the hands could be a daunting task. Not really any less painful way of doing it, except to re rig the weapon to the arms you want. But you will then loose any weapon animation and would have to reanimate it.

The least painful way to deal with this would be to rig a new set of arms, and then rig the weapons and then parent the weapon rig to the arm rig. Re animating and then exporting.

The skeleton for the arms is a human skeleton with the eye set at 0,0,0.

I have brought up this annoying flaw a couple of times. It is rather frustrating that the team didn't stipulate to artists to keep the hands the same as the default or least to offer an alternative pack with the default hands. Changing weapons can be jarring because of this issue and breaks the "suspension of disbelief" for the player.

Not everyone wants the same hands, so GameGuru has its stock arms and hands, and other artist have to make there own as the rig is not provided. This is being looked into on how they want to proceed with it, but I can guess it will have to go to the voting page as to the priority of it getting worked on.

As there could be many different type hand wanted, down to creature hands for certain users. One just may have to rig a set of arms and then add the weapon you want with them and make a set of what you need. Of coarse this would mean learning to rig and animate.

Against the license, Artists can't use the default hands without express permission from TGC, even if they did stipulate that Artists use these they aren't under any obligation to comply with it.

What your asking is near impossible with different uniforms,creatures,gloves, skin color, and a thousand other reasons which arise when you try to create a game which is in the slightest unique and isn't 'default'. Which I assume would be the majority of those creating their own games. Best you can do is stick to a single artist's packs or stick with what comes with GG.

Even the weapons themselves are unlikely to match well with different levels of quality etc, let alone the hands. I don't do weapons but pretty sure if I did mine would look rubbish next to ErrantAI's.

Maybe in future a weapon creator with different hand rigs which will enable different weapons to be swapped out will be feasible but even with that your going to run into problems with animations unless anim files can be loaded in too. In which case Artists would require the rigs. It's not as simple as it all sounds.

I have moved this to the media board as it is not general product chat but related directly to media.

i noticed that in the current vote you are noting interest in a weapons editor. Maybe this problem could be solved in many ways through that.