So far we've got just about everything involved the the mod's developement process except animation. I thought I would take a stab at this. My final goal is to animate and export the sword that will be used by the melee character. Below is the sword model.
The first step is to import the hand rig and align the sword to it. I've got to keep checking the sword in my 'game' camera which is a camera that mimics how one would see it in-game, with the appropriate FOV and position. Here is the sword positioned and parented to the hand rig.