Ok i seem to have found where the hierarchy is in the 3ds files. this tells which mesh each mesh is linked to. there seemed to be some contradiction in the documents about this and for many days i was really confused because all the models i was testing didn't have any parts linked to each other; the body parts were just free floating even though they were touching each other and looked normal. anyway i found one model that did have the parts linked to each other and now i have confirmed all this with one of the other 3ds viewers i downloaded which i now use for some testing. i asked Alon to confirm this for me in 3dsmax but he seems to be busy. anyway i don't think i need him to do that anymore. i will trust this other free 3ds viewer even though it has many of the same bugs as my program including the notorious mesh-misplacement bug.

so what this means is that i think modellers will just have to write the word "turret" in the name of the mesh that is the turret and then my program with knowledge of the hierarchy will know all the other meshes that connect to this mesh or not and seperate them into different voxel files based on that. so is this what you modellers are doing already? are you making meshes link to each other? i cannot think of a better solution for making my program decide how to seperate models into base and turret files.