Third Person Weapons???

8bitboy

Its really a simple question. How would you go about spawning weapons or objects onto a player during a animation. This really confusing me because what if its a pistol and it has its own mag and you have to take the mag out. Would you play both animation at the same time or is it a different pipeline? Any help I would much appreciate as I have gone through a lot of documentation(Source, Unreal, Unity) without any luck. 

GlowingPotato

I think most games uses a retargeting system to make this work. So you have multiple animations and blend them together into one.
So you can run at the same time reload a gun. The legs will be playing the running animation and your arms will do the reloading. Still, need a lot of animations.

8bitboy

So which frame would I spawn the gun. I want to switch weapons without hiding them in the hand and revealing each selected weapon. I know that sounds confusing, but what is the best method to spawn it onto the hand. 

GlowingPotato

Frames does not play a role in here. You need to split animations for your character for lower body and upper body. So you can merge animations when you need to.

musashidan

You could just animate the arms going down off screen, and back up. Just switch out at the middle of the anim when the arms are hidden.

GlowingPotato

musashidan said:

You could just animate the arms going down off screen, and back up. Just switch out at the middle of the anim when the arms are hidden.

But i think hes doing it for a third person game.

musashidan

GlowingPotato said:

musashidan said:

You could just animate the arms going down off screen, and back up. Just switch out at the middle of the anim when the arms are hidden.

But i think hes doing it for a third person game.

Haha! It's 5am here and I'm still up render testing......didn't even register the title

8bitboy

So to get this right: I have a starting animation, which has the first frame in t-pose. I use this starting animation as a way to get weapons onto my character in a way where its streamlined and I can spawn them onto the wrists. After that I am free to make new animations that return the character to a default gun stance (reload, recoil, etc). I hope that made sense, I am familiar with Unity's mecanim but not entirely with the animation pipeline, in which you have to have animated objects spawned onto characters and somehow you have to have them in sync together. 

musashidan

I suppose it's a case of doing what's best for your character and make the switch as seamless as that allows: does the character start with a gun? Do they have a backpack, a holster? How big are the guns? All these factors should help you make the choice of when/how to animate the switch. Because you're using Mecanim I presume you can blend the different anims, whether the character's idling/walking/jumping/etc.

8bitboy

My character starts out without a gun (its survival) but finds guns later in the game. I want to have the gun holstered first then taken out, which then leads to the reload and fire animations. I know you can do the firing in IK if you wanted to but what about the reload with the clip? The problem is that I don't know where to spawn the gun because if I spawn it during the start of the animation say the t-pose it would effect animation(would there be a t-pose for every animation?). But if I spawn it during the unholstering animation its rotation would be off I believe. There is very little documentation on this, all of it is on spawning on sockets and enabling/disabling it (not efficient). Thanks for replying to my questions though, I do appreciate it. 

8bitboy

Really my question is how to orient the gun rotation correctly in game and how you animate the gun when both objects(gun reload and hand reload are separate meshes) are two separate animations. 

GlowingPotato

If you aren't using IK in game, then you need to animate the reloading animation with your gun inside you animation software, and then export this to the game engine.

Orient the gun rotation inside the game is engine specific and there is a lot of way to do this. The most common for objects that attach to character is TagPoints. You match bones orientation. Your gun needs a simple rig.

8bitboy

Okay, thanks. So do I play both hand and gun reload animations?

musashidan

What's your animation workflow? Are you animating the character and the gun in the same scene or are you animating both separate and trying to align them in engine?

8bitboy

I am animating them both in engine for the reloads, I use the link constraints (for clip) and then I export them separately to the engine. I don't think this is the best technique though, if your willing to give me a better workflow that would be SO helpful. Or any links to better documentation and I am using 3ds Max 2016.