Hey man! I know watching videos can be very tedious and boring, but I’ve learned A LOT from watching videos and really, you can’t learn something you wont use some how. So no video is a bad video unless its inaccurate. Anyways, What you’re asking is more than one person could really fit into a single question which is probably why not many have tried. I will try to simplify a little bit here but touch basis on what you’re asking.
- If you are making a FPS you will need 2 models. 1, the third person model(what everyone else sees in the game) and 2, the arms/hands(what the player sees) You will need to animate them separately. (Ex: The third person character will walk around and shoot, however when the player Aims and the arms draw the gun up to simulate the character is looking down the sights, you won’t actually be using that animation to look down sights for the FPS player, that will come with a totally separate set of animations for the first person arms)
- If you want to animate the arms/hands for the guns, you will Simply have a set of meshes (Arms/Hands) that will be a skeletal mesh, meaning they will be weighted to a bipedal skeleton. In Blender you will simply add the weapon you want to animate for and animate the arms/hands with this weapon, but when you export the animations with the Arm/hands you will NOT export the weapon. You won’t need it. When you want a player to pick up, say a shotgun, and the arms/hands will trigger a Boolean (ex: you’ll make a variable called “is using Shotgun” of the variable type Boolean) if its true then the arms/hands will use the Shotgun locomotion in the animation blueprint for your arms/hands. You will simply “Attach” the Shotgun skeletal mesh to the FPS character.
- If you want to switch up Gloves, this is really easy, you’ll just make a glove for each, or both hands and bone weight them to the Bipedal Skeleton just like you did with the Arms/Hands and then the arms and hands will be two separate skeletal meshes combined into one in the FPS Character, and anytime you “equip” a glove you’ll just swap out the Skeletal mesh with the one you are “equipping”.
- If you want to change the skins of your weapons this would be done by creating a “Master” material for the weapons and then creating a “Material Instance” of that said material. You’ll then apply the Material Instance to the Weapon and anytime you edit the Material on the Weapon, you’ll be changing the “Instance” of the master material which will allow you to edit, manipulate and update the material per weapon, per player. If you tried editing the actual material of the spawned weapon, it would not persist and would not replicate properly.
If you want accurate videos to watch, goto Youtube.com and look for “Unreal Engine” Youll see a channel called Unreal Engine with a Check Mark next to it. This signifies legitimacy and means this is the Official Unreal Engine Epic Games team. Watch their videos above all else as they are the most accurate for unreal engine learning base.
Also, for blender look up “Blender Guru” hes a genius with Blender and anything he teaches you, will be legit. Easy to learn and he explains it exceptionally well. I hope this information helps you and if you ever need help, add me on the Epic Games Launcher “CoalFireGaming”