Weird issues with Client Side Bone Merged Models...

Garry's Mod coding
#1

So I have a weapon that when the player picks it up, it slaps a client-side model on to that player and bone merges it. It works 100% of the time, but when tested in multiplayer, when a player gets far enough from another player wearing armor, far enough that the armored player is no longer rendered, the client-side model detaches from the player and sits T-Posed, so when the unarmored player can render the armored player, there’s just a T-Posed model floating in the last place the armored player was rendered. I have a function for attaching the models that runs in SWEP:Initialize() with an If CLIENT then Statement.

Now I know it seems really weird to use a weapon as a placeholder for an armor, system but I don’t really see any other way to do it in the gamemode I’m working on. As far as the functionality of the armor, it’s 100% functional and un-exploitable, I’m just tying to get it to represent your armor visually, and that’s the biggest issue I’m having.

Here’s what I have:



function SWEP:Initialize() -- clientside
	if CLIENT then
		local realmodel = self.Owner:GetNWString("RPMODEL") --gamemode specific
		if string.find(realmodel, "female") or string.find(realmodel, "alyx") or string.find(realmodel, "mossman") then
			female = true
		else
			female = false
		end
		if female then
			self.newmodel = self.ArmorModel_female
		else
			self.newmodel = self.ArmorModel_male
		end
		self.Owner:SetNWString("armormodel", self.newmodel)
		self:EquipArmor()
	end
end

function SWEP:EquipArmor()
	armormodel = self.Owner:GetNWString("armormodel")
	armor = self.Owner
	armor.mdl = ClientsideModel(armormodel)
	armor.mdl:SetParent(armor)
	armor.mdl:AddEffects(EF_BONEMERGE)	
	self.Owner:SetMaterial("models/effects/vol_light001")
end

I’m still a fairly new programmer and my only teacher is the gmod wiki, so I’m doing the best I can. Thanks for any replies or suggestions you guys might have!