Huh.. worked when I added it to the bone head 1. Now there's a alot of missing faces.. But atleast it sits right. Hope this helps someone, eventually

You ALWAYS need to apply bones to your model. Where did you read that you shouldn't? Figure out what bones you need, parent your model to those bones and then adjust the weights (manually or using weight paint mode).

As for the missing faces problem: select your model, go into edit mode, click "recalculate normals" in the panel to the left (I think press ctrl+n works too), and then re-export and compile your model.

http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=57315

Misinterpret that, but I find it really weird that they don't write which bone you should bind your item slot to over at http://www.dota2.com/workshop/requirements#hero.

Thanks for quick answer though!

Some items are pretty straightforward (like nature's prophet's staff only uses 1 bone), but others are applied to multiple bones. Sometimes the process by which Valve rigs their models to the bones is automatic, and some parts have many bones-- like brewmaster's shoulder pieces.

Thus it would be impractical to list every single bone that each model needs to use. You can check yourself using weight-paint mode, though (google this... it's very useful).

Anyway, good luck.

Many thanks!

Alright, I've got the helm working and now I'm doing a neck piece. I've looked into weight paint mode but I can't get my neck item to work. When I look at the original neck piece it only reacts (gets red) to bone 1. I've added head 1 as parent, made UV map and everything like my other items. Rotation 0, scale 1, location 0, but it simply doesn't show up.

I've tried renaming it aswell.

Any ideas?

Hm... are you sure the neckpiece uses only 1 bone? Doesn't sound right to me, although I haven't checked Tusk myself. The problem most likely lies in the rig. "Not showing up" equates to not being rigged properly. I would try to re-rig your model. In a different blender scene, open tusk's model and check to see if the neck piece really is only applied to 1 bone.

When I check it in texture mode it's see-through.

Solved. I selected all vertices and pressed W -> Set all normal or something like that. Really weird though. Thanks for answering anyway!

And yes, the neck piece only uses one bone!

If you still want an explanation:

Models have faces, and each face can only be textured from one side (there are exceptions). The side which corresponds to the texture is said to have a normal vector pointed away from this face orthogonally. If your normal vectors are flipped, the texture will appear inside your model, and from the outside it will be transparent. Therefore when you recalculated your normals, you basically ensured that the normals were facing the right way.

I hope this explanation helped. And good luck!