CoD/Battlefield style: Dedicated FPS arms+weapon rendered only by the player. Some sort of First Person full body model to cast its own shadows and body recognition.
+seems to have the most control in terms of aiming
+capable of using procedural or physics based sway and recoil effects
-requires the most art and animations
True FPS Camera (Arma, Crysis):
+seems to require the least amount of art/animations
+most immersive
-least flexibility in terms of aiming (must move camera to an aim socket or tweak the animation for every weapon perfectly)
-the best position visually for the weapon may not be the best position visually for the First person view
-difficulties with avoiding clipping while showing the desired amount of FPS Weapon on screen.
Why do modern games still use the CoD/Battlefield style when True FPS Camera is a possibility? Which method would be easier to work with for a small team?
You do the animations once.
Your standard FPS has animations for the view you see (first person) and other animations for what everyone else sees (third person).
This often creates a disconnect between what is/isn’t actually happening for people around you.
e.g. You are shot by magic rays from someones head instead of their actual weapon.
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I’d go for a true first person view everytime.
Tweaking the animations for exact sight alignment is not required.
With a little bit of math, you can easily compensate for the differences.
This is what we do in GroundBranch.
Get the sight ‘close enough’, then fudge the result with math.
Avoiding clipping can be easy, depending on the kinda of accuracy you’re looking for.
In the past, we use a simple sweep of the game world before switching the animation to an obstructed view.
We’ve since dropped that in favour of a method that allows for accurate collisions.
Unfortunately, there were issues related to sweep the weapon collision geometry, as UE4 doesn’t support rotational sweep by default.
This can be fixed with Rama’s Melee Plugin, which we have, but are yet to fully implement while we experiment with an option that uses basic physics and IK.
I’ve been looking into Ground Branch for awhile now and really like what yall have done with the game. The animations are so smooth.
Are you guys able to use one animation for many rifles and then fudge the camera into a proper position via math?
Also, is there a way to “split” animations through re-targeting or something? For example…splitting the animations between lower and upper body so that you can use the same animated running lower body for running with different types of weapons? I’m not big into animating or modeling so I really don’t know much about it.
Yes, its one animation for long guns and another for hand guns.
The hand positions are adjusted via IK in the animation Blueprint.
The final camera position is based off the difference between the camera component location and the location of the current sight.
Yes, splitting the animations up between lower/upper body has been the standard practice in a lot of titles for quite some time
You don’t have too, it just makes the number of animations require much more manageable.
