There are various reasons for these kinds of problems. To help I loaded a new page with example 3ds Max files here. At the moment it only has one file to demonstrate your scene. I'll load others in the future. Tips include making sure that the transform is reset. When using skin, do not use the Rotate Origin setting in…
The secret is that each scene node that exports is also a bone... and if no skin is applied then each vertex is, by default, weighted 100% to the bone of that node. The one challenge with taking advantage of this is when you want to export a collision mesh too... the collision mesh needs to have each element mapped to a…
I'm not entirely certain that we are talking apples to apples. I'm not suggesting to make several separate models. The methods above will all output a single model with one bodypart, one batch, one VMT. The SMDs look almost identical accept that the skinned SMDs have more bone nodes. The compiler prunes the unused bones…