In short ( excuse the pun ) we can make correctly proportioned Dwarves.

RTW modding was always limited by the skeletons. We could scale them up or down, but that was all we could do. Dwarves were done ... but they were scaled down people, which meant ALL the poportions were reduced. They looked like children... while fantasy Dwarves should be as broad sholdered as a human, and just shorter of leg. We couldn't do what we needed to make them correct.

Also....orces need slightly longer arms than a human, broad shoulders, and slightly shorter legs. Again....just using a normal human skeleton did not look good....I know...I tried!

But now, thanks to the work Grumpy Old Man and KnightErrant have put in to fully understand the MESH format and the animations that power them, and thanks to Caliban arranging to get a full set of stock animations released in an uncompressed and accessable form, we have the power to change the skeleton ANY WAY WE WANT. Better still....we can then force the stock animation routines to work on the new skeletons without having to re-write every single one of them! A stock skeleton uses about 50 or 60 animations. Each one would have to have been edited by hand. That would take weeks. With the alpha toolset KE sent me, I did the job in 5 minutes.

So...in summary .... I know have the tools and knowledge to stretch, tweak, scale and then animate any shape we want as long as it's broadly human, and not have to re-do ANY animations. Having done a lot of animation work for RTW mods...I know just how much work this has saved me, and how major a step this is towards making a really high quality fantasy mod. Dwarves have nver ben done properly in a TW game.... they were just tiny children made by scaling down .... no longer.

I'm happy about this...really happy!