First person game with third person models (for other cameras)?

Hey everyone, this is my first time working on a first person game, and I was wondering what approach you guys would recommend for this type of game. It is a multiplayer FPS, so that would mean that I need to use different meshes for when a pawn is possessed vs being viewed from the “outside”.

My issue here is that I’m not sure how this works when it relates to animations… Do I create two different animations, one for each model? How do I make sure that they are in sync? Or do I use the same third person mesh for the first person view and just hide the bones that could mess up the camera?

For instance, in Overwatch it looks like this (taken from another question):

https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=146679&d=1498699931

https://forums.unrealengine.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=146681&d=1498700072

The first person model matches the third person model so perfectly that it looks to me as if they just hid the bones from the third person one and called it a day. I’m kinda lost regarding this, so any pointers would be appreciated…

Thank you!

That’s what I assumed, but I’m not sure how to approach this if I decide to do something like melee animations. For guns and the like that seems just fine, but what if you’re slashing with a sword? Are there two swords, one for the player and one for everyone else? Or is there a single sword, and then the event that attaches the sword to a socket attaches it to either depending on whether the event is running on the local client or someone else?

Also, what about the actual animation? If you decide to use precise collisions, and the sword is following two separate paths, it might seem buggy, no?

Sorry to bombard you with so many questions but I can’t seem to find out how to do this… Thanks regardless!

Yeah pretty much, that or using complex collision from the mesh settings. Any type of collision in which the actual location/rotation of the weapon impacts what it does. But now that I think about it, it’s a bit of a silly question since you can probably just handle collision locally so even if it doesn’t actually collide in the other players’ view, it’ll still do it anyways because it did in the player’s view. But it might still seem off though…

Yeah, even if it doesn’t directly answer my questions it definitely helps, thanks!

I saw something like these in a video but i don’t remember wich one. It’s from Epic i’m sure bout that. They explained how to setup this in a very simple way. You just use the arms that come with fptemplate for your FPS view, while the others will see a completely different mesh with different anims (third person mannequin).

Replication | Live Training | Unreal Engine - YouTube this is the one

srry what do you mean with precise collisions? that u use collision shapes attached to the weapons?

Best answer i can give you right now with this informations is give a good look at that video that i linked. I hope that’s gonna help! =)

Hi jfaztk,
I’m just wondering how you made out and what solution you came up with? I’m also working on a fairly large project and am doing something similar. The difference is that we’ve got about 120 unique characters so it’s quite a bit of work as you can imagine.