Ok I am creating a Winged Twilight daedra creature (almost complete with the upper body just need to add in some extra muscles around the briast area for flight muscles and change how the backbone is viewed so it will mesh with the tail I am building better).

However, I have tried multiple times (over the past 10 hours!) to get the hands part of the mesh rigged up properly. No matter what I do when I apply the animation to the model in nifskope the fingers get all bunched up and smash up the hands mesh. I got the original weights to the vertex groups by parenting the mesh to the armature I made and using "bone heat" to make the weights. However, this really messed up the hands and while I was able to easily adjust the rest of the mesh I cannot get the fingers to work for me :/.

I know it has to do with the weight painting... and I've tried multiple different approaches to fixing it... but I just can't get it to work.

I'm using Blender 2.49b with niftools if that matters. I have 3DS Max 2010 on a student license but never got around to learning it...

If there's anyone that I could email the .nif or .blend file to (or I could import it into max and export an .obj if needed) that could have a look at what I'm doing wrong that would be great!