I don't understand why everyone uses as few geosets (meshes?) as possible. Is not easier to make a lot of primitives which resembles the most certain part of the model (ex. sphere for head, cylinder for arms,...) and then edit them than making one base mesh and adding faces one after one. Big troubles come when you try to make animations. It is almost impossible to make animation if you assign two bones to the same mesh.
Efficiency. Less polygon wastage. The computer is faster at handling two geosets that use different materials than sixteen geosets using the same material. A lot of reasons.
using more than one bone on the same mesh. It can be done. All you need to do is work in all viewports like ur top, left etc. Scale the bones smaller in certain areas. Make the bones fit inside the mesh tightly like a real skeletal system. Work with your bone tools tool bar to set tapers and so forth. Look in non perspective viewports to examine which vertices are being affected when you use the envelopes. Lastly use the link command to have some of the non connected bones follow the root bone or main bone. http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/9561/screenshotbone9hs.th.jpg
I know that when you envelope a mesh with a bone, it red zones are affected by this bone. But sometimemes some zones become yellow or orange. What do they mean?
Gmax rigging is horrible, plus it's the worst modeling program for warcraft. Most people animate on a single mesh as well, but if you're desperate, you can split it it up.
So? It's not identical to 3DS Max. Its a shafted down version based upon an earlier version of 3DS Max
Gmax sucks for WC3 modding. I only use it for NWN modding, mainly because someone actually made a very good and complete exporter/importer for use in Gmax for NWN