Any way to 'merge' two armatures

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I have a small problem regarding skeletons and I have no idea how to fix it.

The problem is that I have 2 .blend files ripped from a game.

One of them is a rigged model of arms used by a player
These sexy beasts

and the other one is a rigged weapon model with the same bones as the arms, but without the arms themselves.
Like so

I’d like to animate the gun+arms but I have no idea how to ‘append’ the already rigged arms to their respective bones in the weapon’s skeleton, so that I could actually see what I’m doing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

also I figured this out, but that’s only partially what I want. I’d like the arms to be in the position set by the bones rather than where they started out.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

2

I think you can use CTRL-J in object mode, Select the armature you want merging first then the armature you want to merge INTO second (SHIFT-RMB to select). I am not sure at this stage, without spending some more time, whether it will work, since the arm’s vertex groups may not match from the two merged armatures, bone renaming may be necessary.

I look again tomorrow - it’s bedtime in the UK.

Cheers, Clock.