A Question of Shields........

Shields are differently placed on the different units, and have different shapes too, My problem is to know how are made the coords for placing them.
I have my round copper shielded turkish sarracen swordsmen, based on chainhlm and placed under custom8, and every shield entry for the chainhlm, on the items folder gives me a large oval shaped shield.
I tried to adapt some other texture shield position, and the neginf seems to be the most acceptable, but is too high while walking/running and weird when charging/fighting. so I made sort of a frankenstein using viking stand, neginf run/walk/charge and viking fight and this gave me an acceptable but not perfect position.
I wish I could change shield shape/position at will.
could someone give me the math of it?

thank you.

Tyberius.

Take a peek at the "unit animations" thread in the Repository (IIRC) which has a great explanation, however, I believe the linked illustrations have "gone west". I tend to go the Frankenstein route as well :laugh4:

Edit: useful tip - in custom battle mode you can make changes "on the fly" - ie Alt-Tab out of MTW, edit your item coordinates, Alt-Tab back into the battle and see what's changed.

Another edit: also try defining your shield rectangle with more space around it (ie as a new shield in shields.txt) and you can probably correct some of the distortions.