This is because the Blender Source Tools import the reference mesh of SMDs and DMX', not taking their bone positions into account, as that could produce rather strange results, depending on the already existing armature.

Thank you for your response Vintage. Is this something than can be fixed or changed in a future version? Maybe an override option that will take their bone positions into account?

I'm not the techie, I'm just the... techie. Whatever, I don't work on the Blender Source Tools, I just know how they work, so don't ask me. Either way, don't expect it.

But one way it could possibly be done, Artfunkle/Artfunkel/the author of the Blender Source Tools, would be I think to first import the mesh with its armature separate from the already existing armature, then loading the position and rotation data from the existing armature (like when importing an animation) and applying it to the new armature, then moving the mesh over to use the existing armature as skeleton, and deleting the new armature.
That would just cause problems when there's more than 1 armature already...
Well, it's a possibility, I think.

Originally posted by Vintage:

I'm not the techie, I'm just the... techie. Whatever, I don't work on the Blender Source Tools, I just know how they work, so don't ask me.

Lol! Well I thank you for your time in reading it and your input.

Hopefully Mr. "Artfunkle/Artfunkel/the author of the Blender Source Tools" can come up with something. It's kind of important that I get this working properly in Blender (3DS Max isn't appropriate). I'm availble if I can help in any way providing more info or test files.

What are you importing, and in which exact order? It would help if you uploaded your blend file.

Hi Artfunkel,

Here is a zip file with the .smds and .blend file. I import "faceless_void_refrence.smd" first, followed by "facless_void_weapon_reference.smd", and then "run.smd". I also included another animation "flail.smd" as more test material.

Dropbox[www.dropbox.com]

These models are freshly extracted and decompiled from Dota2. I'm using Blender 2.68 and Blender Source Tools 2.1.0. Blender 2.70 has the same result.

Please let me know if I can provide anything else to help!

When importing the weapon you need to uncheck the "append to existing model" option. Then go into pose mode and add a Copy Transforms constraint to the weapon bone, targetting the character bone with the same name.

Brilliant! Maybe a future version could have a checkbox that goes through automagically and applies the constraint to every bone matching with the animation bones. I also found it useful to set the weapon's parent back to the main animation/mesh after applying the bone constraints. This kind of keeps everything in one "object".

Thank you!