Wavy Bits:I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to do wavy bits on items. If you don't have to deal with multi item characters(practically everything but RPG's) i would just use key frames for all the actions and then the wavy bits are easy. But what if you are using multi item characters(like an MMORPG) …
Of course you are probably using bones to do the animations in an RPG. most things like armor, weapons, etc don't have wavy bits(please excuse my repetitious use of my uneducated term).
My example of items that have wavy bits are cloaks, kimonos, capes, etc.
Of course character animations aren't going to be universal they are going to depend on class and item, probably not race(if your game has race) so i guess you define levels of priority to the animations:
the universal animations is default to the class animation,
the class animation is default to the item animation.
This is working with bones that already exist.
My thinking for wavy bits was that they would be bone animations that would be attached to the character animations when the item with the wavy bits(like a kimono or cape) was equipped. This really depends on your game but I was just interest on what ideas people had about wavy bits and games with large numbers of items :).
Wavy bits 
It makes me laugh but i don't know a better word to call them, if you know, please tell.
Character shape: Another thing I was curious about was customizable character shapes ie. tall, short, fat, skinny. hobbit, dwarf, giant, bean pole.
Would you just take the bones(assuming your using bones) and scale them? x and z for fat/skinny, z for tall/short.
Do BoneTransforms support scaling?
If not, is that why ColladaImporter doesn't support bone scalings?
For the wavy bits (cough), I am not really sure, but there's probably a way to map the item's joints onto the character's joints, otherwise you could try creating a controller that transforms the item with the character's joint transforms.
For character animations, all you need is to make sure each model has the same joint configuration, then you could just copy over the joint transforms to another model and it should work without any scaling.
Momoko_Fan said:
For character animations, all you need is to make sure each model has the same joint configuration, then you could just copy over the joint transforms to another model and it should work without any scaling.
I don't see how use a model animation for multiple models has anything to do with scaling. The only time i talk about scaling is for character shape. I don't know that I'm understanding right.