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I am totally new to the skinning system that 3DS Max uses. I took EAI's hands, deleted the shorter one, then copied and mirrored the other. I THEN modified them, and realized, how am I going to animate these? So now, I am here. I've been looking for some tutorials on the web, but none really fit what I am aiming for - I JUST WANT TO RIG THE MESH TO BONES THAT I PREVIOUSLY CREATED (I at least know how to do that). You know, the blue-ish things that stick out of guns and such that allow you to move only certain parts of the mesh. So, does anyone who uses max know how I can go about that?

Screenie of the mesh is attached...

You can use a Skin modifier on the Mesh.

Attach all bones to the hands (There's an Add button in the side panel) and then edit the envelopes to fit the parts which each bone has an effect on.

You could use IK Solvers for better/accurate movement and then all you have to do is make the animations using the bones (movement).

Okay, I decided to use EAI's rigging to the hands (which means that I had to re-modify it) but now the problem is that I only have 1 hand! I cloned and mirrored it, but the result comes out all black. I tried flipping all the faces, but that didn't work. I also tried exporting the 1 hand to a .smd to Fragmotion, and I mirror it in there and it's fine. When I get it back into Max, all the bones are messed up (they are all rotated 180 degrees, but the mesh is still perfectly rigged) and I cannot animate with them. Lastly, I tried just importing the original hands into Fragmotion, mirrored it all, then exported, but it didn't show up mirrored in Max. Any ideas on how I could get another copy of the hand, but flipped along the X axis?

EDIT: Got it! I had to open the 1 arm in Max, export the mesh/bones and a one frame animation as .smd's, then imported it into Fragmotion, exported it as a .x with a flipped x axis, imported it back, exported it as the 2 .smd's, then imported it into Max, and re-textured it.

@Gencheff,
Thanks for the info on skinning!