I'm trying to make a desk (my first object without a tutorial) and pretty far I think I've done pretty well. But now I've reached the point where I need to use the mesh tool, and of course, something had to go wrong.

I'm pretty sure this is because the Maxis object I cloned has an odd GMDC... theres two of them. One that just says desk, and the other one says there are four shadows. I've tried both of them in the mesh tool but nothing is working.

Also, I see no sub-groups in the mesh tool.

Ah, what should i do?

(attached are the GMDC's I see)

I'm not sure what you mean by 'nothing is working'.
Do you want to see a preview of your mesh?
If so you need to tick the box next to desk and then click preview.
Have you loaded your mesh into SimPE yet?

I've loaded the mesh and the gmdc, i want to enter the subgroups for each thing. I'm just not finding subgroup numbers for anything, and as i click the minus and plus, the image does not change to another.

The 'left' GMDC contains inside shadows - a set of one-sided rectangles with grayscale textures. I usually delete those, but if you want to fix them, this mini-tutorial explains how.
The 'right' GMDC contains the actual desk. It's a bit strange that it's unchecked by default, though - it usually happens if subset has Opacity different from -1 (made of glass or something). Is it your case?
I hadn't used MeshTool for ages, so I don't remember whether it had problems with transparent subsets. But anyway, unless you want to pick something specific from this desk - it might be better to clone another one.

Hmmm... it is not a glass object or anything like that. Its "The Rollin' Secretary from McKraken Industries" I think that in milkshape for a GMDC I should be opening a 5gd file. Am i right? If thats correct, then the 'desk' GMDC that I extracted from the original file does not extract as a 5gd. The shadows one do, but when I open that in the mesh tool, and then click on one of the shadow's subgroups, the window closes because it doesnt agree.

I guess with the mesh tool I'm trying to put animation to my desk? If you have any suggestions other than this program, that would do the same thing the mesh tool is supposed to, that would be good.

To be quite honest, i have no idea what the mesh tool does. I just followed a tutorial, so therefore i dont know how to fix it! haha.

And thank you so much for taking the time out to help me!
I'm so confused!

i still need some help :/