I asked this a while ago but forgot what happened to the post. Anyway i brought 2 weapon packs and i now need to animate them i never really have animated but i know the basics i was wondering when animating a gun does the gun control the recoil movement or is it the hands that make the gun bounce when shot?
I don’t know your rig but it is almost certain that your weapon will be attach to a socket in the charactere skeleton.
In that case, you’ll animate the charactere and the gun will follow 
But, in the case of a reload animation, it’s heavily probable that you will have 2 animations : one for the hand that remove the clip and one for the clip (or any moving piece of your gun)
Is there any tutorials for animation arms i have got the ironbelly arm rig from the marketplace and when ever i try to animate it the arms just get twisted and look horrible also i have animations already made how do i import the mesh and animation into blender and attach to animation to the rig?
Sorry buddy, I’m not a blender guy ^^.
But you seam to be at the very beginning of your learning.
You’ll need to learn about blender first, make your own skeleton, play with it, export it and play with it again in UE4.
That’s how you will learn. You shouldn’t buy complex model on the market , hopping they will be magically operant in UE4.
There’s is so many tutorials about every aspect of what you want to do that I can’t give you one. Don’t be too specific. If you learn how to build a skeleton in blender and animate it, you’ll be able to make any animation.
For learning purpose, do it by yourself and when you’ll have understand the skeletal mesh and animations, then, you eventually use these asset to spare time but you have a lot of work before
Hang on !
Yeah i brought this 3d modelling and animation course on udemy which is 50hours long and i only brought it because it was on sale but im not looking to get very good at animation just trying to make simple animations because im mainly a programmer and hardly know much about animations im all down for learning how it works of course but every time i have tried it gets me very frustrated because they just fly all over the place and become out of place etc (the mesh) the fingers are the worst 
It’s very hard to be a specialist in many task ^^
That’s why effective teams are… teams
But I think it’s a good practice to know a little about every aspect of what you are working on.
Start a very small project from scratch to learn the bases.
- make a stylistic guy (learn to model)
- rig it with 7 bones (learn to rig)
- create a walk cycle (learn to animate)
- put it in a basic game (learn to import/export)
When you’ll have did that, every question you’ll have will have a starting point
And it’s fun !
But don’t forget, there’s several different professions working on software like blender… There’s only few people on earth how really know everything about it ^^.
Yes, fingers are often the worst ^^.
As an animator this made me chuckle as it is kind of like me saying I learned how to program in C++ on my own by watching a video but the reality would take years to fully understand coding as an art form as to how the small details that can only be learned by experience makes the difference. The good news is Ironbelly’s products are excellent as they already included the necessary authored base animations for the weapon and 1st person hands so as a coder you have at least what would be necessary to do 1st person firing as well as reloading of the weapon. Since he does use Epic’s skeletal rig it would even be possible to target the animations on the 1st person arms to the 3rd person rig and use layering by bone.
As to answering the original post the answer is C all of the above. 
as it relates more towards the authoring of animation, and what tools are used, and not so much as to what is expected as to how it has to be done once imported into UE4.
In this case I use Motion Builder and our player models are rigged with both 1st and 3rd person models. To do weapon animations the weapon of choice is then linked constrained to the ik_gun and hand contacts are constrained using AUX effectors and then animation is key framed using the weapon as the end effector. The result is 1st 3rd and weapon are animated verbose and the recoil as far as the animations goes is bound to the first person hands and the weapon only functions as expected of a mechanical device.
For the most part that is how it could be made as to something that is useful but putting it all together in Unreal 4 is the hard part as to the nuts and bolts that you should learn and understand first as to how the connections are made and once you have that figured out you can then look at packages like Ironbelly’s and see it as a raw source can work together.
Im not sure if you will know but when i buy gun models from the marketplace they are AAA models but when i use them in game they do not look like the AAA models that these big titles have such as call of duty is this to do with they are better AAA models or the textures are higher res? also the texture res is 2048x2048 is that good?
I agree when you purchase assets they are usually done with the expectations of being fit to finish and lack the detail and level of fidelity of what would be considered studio grade. I believe this is a case of assumption of catering to what someone thinks is needed and not what is required as to the ideals that the edit environment should be responsible for managing the required output to maintain a balanced performance curve as demanded by what would be considered a NextGen game but are still being built to what is considered 10 year old best practice ideology.
In my opinion higher res textures = good as it’s easier to take to much and make it less and some material types, like Substance, allow you to output the level of resolution to scale down the visuals as needed and Unreal 4 already has the ability to degrade the visuals in favor of a higher performance curve. To put it into perspective if your making a movie one is probably going to film at the highest possible resolution and let YouTube, as a point of distribution, re-sample the work as to need.
As a though what makes all the difference is lighting and if you don’t have it done right no matter how good the models are and the resolutions of material the result is going to look bad. To get that AAA look and feel all things have to work in harmony.