Weapons and Arms

I'm working on the First Person aspect of my system, and would like to know how one goes about placing a weapon into the hands of a premade arm, and have that weapon follow the arm (or hand, rather, in this case) no matter how you've animated it previously. Any suggestions? I've got three races, and a slew of weapons to choose from and I really don't want to have to animate each and every combination of each, but if I must, I shall ... just wondering if there's an easier way. Thanks.

P.S. Morrowind is a good example of how I want this system to work, you could make custom weapon, and the system would know where to move the weapon based on the the hands animation alone.

position it in the hand and parent it there. make sure the weapon pivot is in the right place to start of with.(done in modelling app)

Hmm, any way to bind it to the hand exactly, instead of the whole arm? because that does parent it to the arms, but it doesn't move with the hand, or arm animations. Thanks!

when you model the character put a pivot(bone?) where the hand is.. Then when you load this char in your game you can attach your weapon as a child of the hand bone.

Hope that helps.

Hmm, that sounds very promising. How would I attach it to the bone exactly (through blitzbasic commands) Thanks for your help.

Yay, I figured it out with the hand-joint method! Thanks!