I’m learning the ropes of animation from the bottom and wanted to make sure I was on the right track before continuing (would really appreciate answers to any of the questions below)
Is the ART tool mainly just for fast prototyping or for creating actual final rigs and animations for the finished product?
I’m working on a first person shooter, so will be doing the third person and first person animations- however is it normal practice at Epic (referencing the ShooterGame example) to just create the first person animations using the full third person mesh, and then just create a second skeletal mesh to import that just contains the arm meshes but the full skeleton- essentially allowing you to animate the full 1P/3P animations set using a single character in the ART tool?
When attaching weapon meshes to the hand joint- how can you add them to export- right now the exporter only shows (No Weapon) even with a weapon as a child to the hand joint and selected. Also referencing ShooterGame, how can the animators make the aim animation line up perfectly with the centre of the screen? Are there some good setup values that would aid the creation process and have a single set origin point for all weapon aim animations? (should there be an additional joint at the WeaponPoint on the character mesh?)
Sorry for the many questions- any knowledge here would help me out a lot- I have scoured the documentation but I think the things I mentioned here aren’t mentioned in detail.