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The Battlefield MDT Animation Tutorial is horrible. Let me try and explain:
First thing we are going to do is import our Soldier Skeleton. So go to Battlefield Tools, Skeleton and Skin. A dialog box appears, in this menu make sure that "As Boxes" and "Is Weapon" are unchecked, doing so will make things go horribly wrong. The batch size is default 100, keep it as so. So now hit Import.ske. Go to your extracted Animations folder and find the UsSoldier.ske and import it to 3ds Max. When it imports you will see a group of bones resembling a running soldier, save this scene as something (soldier.max etc.)
So now we have our soldier in 3ds Max, now I could spend a few hours also writing a tutorial on how to Properly weight a set of hands, but since your doing a knife right now i'm not going to bother. So lets import the weapon skeleton to get the proper positions for our knife. Go back to Skeleton and Skin, this time however, check the boxes of "As Boxes" and "Is Weapon", then locate the knife.ske and import it. The Knife.ske will be imported. Now if you notice the Knife is fused to the right hand, there is no way to undo this, so remember when animating for bf1942 that you can only use the Left hand for any alternate actions. You can animate the right arm, but the weapon itself will never be able to leave the right hand. Unlinking it, or doing another such action will export incorrectly and you will have a few problems.
Now that we have our weapon skeleton in the 3ds Max Scene, lets import an existing animation to base ourselves off of. So lets say your doing a knife animation for First Person, import the Knifes default standing animation and delete all the keys except for the first one. This will give us a platform on which we can animate. The Same thing goes with 3rd Person, if your animating a thrust, import the stand animation so that we have a base. So here we are, our knife skeleton, our soldier skeleton, and a starting pose for our animation, kind of bland without the knife no? So lets get the knife in the scene. Before saving this scene, write down the names of the knifes skeleton boxes. (Base etc.)
So, save this scene, and reset 3ds Max. File, Reset. Now we are going to import the knifes geometry. So go to Model Import or Export and import the Knifes StandardMesh file. After doing so make sure you delete any little extras, all you want is the First LOD. Now rename the meshes to the appropriate skeleton parts for the knife. So for the main body of the knife, since it has no others, name it "Base" or whatever the name of the skeleton box was in the other scene you wrote down. It is case sensitive so make sure to be precise! After doing so save this as a separate scene named "Object" or something.
So now that we have our object geometry, lets open up our other 3ds Max scene with out 2 skeletons in it. So now we are going to replace the Knifes skeleton bones with the geometry. So go to File, Replace, and find your Objects scene with the meshes in it. When you do, click on it. A prompt will come up listing all similarly named objects. You want to replace all of them. At this point if you did everything correctly the weapon skeleton should now be replaced with the weapons geometry, to give you a sense of where its going to be.
So now we can start animating, but before we do that lets set up a few other things to make our lives easier. First and foremost is a camera representing our first person view. If you search through the CommonSoldierData.inc you will find a list of camera positions for different poses. Its been awhile since I animated anything, but the numbers inside the CommonSoldierData.inc represent the 3d Position of the first person camera in the world. In 3ds Max however they are a decimal point off. I don't remember which direction it goes in, but if memory serves me correctly a value of 0.65, would become 6.5 in 3ds Max. Using these coordinates you should be able to place the camera at different locations for different poses (crouching, standing, prone, etc.). After placing the camera make sure that its field of view is 47 degrees, so that it matchs BF1942.
Last thing we wanna do before animating is add some little helpers to our scene. Lets select the left wrist shall we? After selecting the left wrist, go up to Animation, IK Solvers, Hi Solver, a drag and drop line will appear. You want to attach the other end of that line to the upper arm, not the shoulder or clavicle or whatever it is Dice decided to call it. Doing so will make it harder to animate. You want to be able to rotate the bone of the arm that is attached to the neck, so that you can get the arm in different angles. After attaching the IK Solver (if my explanation helped) a point helper will appear on the wrist. If you click and drag this point helper the whole arm will move in conjunction with each other. Making it easier to make fluid movements. The same thing can be done with legs, and the back as well. Do the same thing to the right arm. Save this scene as separate scene, (knife animation) or something along them lines.
Ok so just do something simple, make the arm move. After doing so, make sure to cut your animation off at the ending key frame, extra empty frames will be annoying. Now that you have a simple animation and the knife is moving in some way, open up the Animation prompt from the Battlefield Tools. This is where a lot of people mess up when animating for BF1942. So lets say we are doing a first person animation. Select the circle option box that says "1p Upper", and also check the box "Active Time Segment". Since the knife has no moving parts we will not need to use the "Is Weapon" box, that is strictly for a separate set of animations dealing with weapon parts moving, such as when a bolt flies back during a fire animation. If you are doing a 3rd Person animation and the whole body is moving, you need to export it in pieces. First is the upper half of the body, and then the lower half, using 3p Upper and 3p Lower. Selected Bones is only used when we are exporting with "Is Weapon", for moving Weapon Parts, so ignore it for now.
After that your animation should be exported and should work.
I wrote this kind of quick, so if it doesn't help let me know and i'll make a video of me Animating something later tonight. Should help you out.
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