There are 2 things to not mistake here.
you can attach a geometry to a bone by getting the attachement node on this bone and attach the geometry to it. The effect is that the geometry’s transforms will “copy” the bone transforms. That’s convenient for a sword attached to a hand or even a helmet to a head.
Now, for parts like legs and chest the rig has to deform the mesh not only transform it.
When you export from ogre a rigged character sub-graph is made of a node on which all the character geometries are attached. The AnimControl and the SkeletonControl are set on the Node and not on the sub geoms.
The skeleton control has to know what geometry to deform, so in RC2 when you set the SkeletonControl to the node (node.addControl(skeletonControl)) the geometries from the node sub graph are recursively gathered.
So in RC2, if you change a sub geometry you have to go
[java]
SkeletonControl ctrl = node.getControl(SkeletonControl.class);
node.removeControl(ctrl);
node.addControl(ctrl);
[/java]
Then the sub geoms will be refreshed.
In 3.0, geoms are refreshed on every frame, so you don’t need this and it just works.
When i said “trun your models to J3M”, I meant J3o yes, that was a mistake.
Hope that’s clear to you, and that I answered all your questions.