The way we're gonna do this is by taking a page out of the survivor model porter's book: effectively making a proportion pose that will apply itself on top of every animation in our weapon.


As you can see in the screenshot, Coach's fingers are clipping into the weapon just a lil bit. Not too bad but it can be better. To fix this first import some survivor hands into blender. It doesn't really matter who's although I would avoid using those of the L4D1 crew.

The hands' skeleton will be a little bit offset from that of the model, so just move the hands' skeleton down a bit till they line up. Then just apply transforms and set the hands' armature object to that of your weapon's skeleton.

Next import the idle animation of your weapon, go into the animation tab, select all the bones and delete the keyframes (orange BALLS).

Then insert a keyframe on frame 1 (press I) and select location and rotation.


Switch to the action editor and rename whatever the animation name is to "fingers".

Now go back to frame 0 and pose your fingers into whatever you think is correct. You can also pose the ulna and forearm twist bones if you want to. What you cannot do however is edit the hand, forearm, or upper arm position as these are affected by IK and won't really work when edited.

Your offset animation is now ready, just export it out to your mod folder.

If you aren't using the $includemodel method for the animations (as in all the sequences and animations are in the QC itself) then simply add this to the bottom of your QC:

If you ARE using the $includemodel method, you'll have to do an extra step. Take the mdl you're taking the animations from, and decompile it with the $DeclareSequence QCI file setting checked.

This will create a file called something like "v_electric_guitar_DeclareSequence.qci" depending on what your mdl was called. Drag this QCI into your mod folder and now at the bottom of your model's QC put something like this:
Obviously rename the include to whatever your QCI is called and replace the includemodel with the mdl you're taking the anims from.

And just like that, your new fingers should be in effect and will work across every animation the model has.