well that's sounding great so far Logmyster! I stumbled onto a lightwave plugin today that allows for bones to be attached to vertex's. so that means I can attach bones to the vertex's, and cloth dynamics to the mesh and record the keyframes. this will be great so I can achieve dynamic interpolation between and during cloth animation precomputed for my main character, byebye fbf yay! so that's why I was checking to see if there was a limit as these test proved very successful and didn't want to have to break the model up if there was a limit. thanks.

cool, thanks jestermon, I haven't need this many bones before so good to know it's doable.

just did a test today and the max bones with weightmaps I can actually use with animations is 287 bones/weightmaps. any more and it carashes mview.exe, it does load in rad\3Impact\dxview but verts above the limit are out of whack, so I scaled back and forth till mview didn't crash and that was the above limit. I need to run it through mview for compression so that's the limit as far as I can see.

Fascinating.. I reloaded my old dynamic terrain, and it still runs smoothly.. I used cinema4D to set the bones, and use Panda3D to render the runtime. So limits may be app based.