Hey there,
I'm working with Autodesk Maya 2011 and I've been searching and searching, trying tutorials, and struggling because mainly, they're either for hats or Half-Life objects and aren't giving me the results I need.

I'm working on a custom Heavy weapon called "The Riveting Russian" and I'm having some trouble getting it to work correctly. Should I compile with Itemtest? Or another program? And if so, could you point me to the correct program?... If you could add me as a friend and guide me through it, I would be most grateful, honestly.

I want to test the angle, size, and position of the gun before going into texturing it (I made a rough, quick AO bake onto the model to have something visible in game for now) if you want to check out the last HQ render of the gun that I made, here's a preview of it:
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/031/7/e/_the_riveting_russian____tf2_heavy_weapon__ao__by_statyk94-d5tdyuu.png

Any help would be greatly appreciated... I'm not a genius at Source, so I need some tips here. No clear guides for TF2 Weapon creation for Maya are coming up for me...
Thanks!

PS: The most helpful tutorial I've used was this one, but it proved faulty where I was compiling with ConTEXT. The hl2 model viewer didn't load the model, saying there was errors, and when I went to test the .mdl in TF2 anyway, the game froze and shut down without an error...
http://www.northcapestudios.com/blog/?p=45