I am working on animations for weapons in a fps game but am uncertain about the best approach to commit to before producing lots of these. I have made a practice animation set in blender based on a tutorial in which they suggested to create a rig for the weapon and the player model, then simultaneously run animations on both to achieve things like reloading (where both the hands and parts of the weapon move) or motion on dynamic weapon parts (like the trigger or slide). I like this since it makes it really easy to just play an animation and have everything work without any additional code, but I am curious if this is a good way to handle this process and if people would recommend using a different approach (for example, just having an animation on the player and then attaching components to the player hands during montages)?
Hello there @Killerbanaple!
Checking with my peers, your current approach should work.
Keeping the hands and the weapon as separated meshes, then animating them together will make it easier to setup interactions between them. And since it’s first person, those interactions need to be very precise, as a finger phasing through a magazine will be very noticeable for the player.
As for alternatives, another approach would be to animate just the arms, and attach the weapon to a hand socket. Then, you can use UE’s Anim Notifies to hide the weapon’s mag, and show a separate mag mesh in hand during reload.