Hello, I know this has been asked before, but I recently bought the “Sci Fi Weapons Silver” pack off the Unreal Marketplace, and noticed that the models are not correctly set up for use in the FPS example, and the shooter Game Example.
I ran across a tutorial on using blender to rotate Custom weapons and scaling them to the “Shooter Game Example”, but no hints for the First Person Example project(Found under new project)
Please let me clarify: I am wanting to use and expand the First person Example, NOT the Shooter example.
Call me limited or thick skulled, but I simply Cannot use Blender in any fashion. I would much perfer Maya or 3DS max.
is there anyone that has used the First Person Template(New project Blueprint version), and attempted to do something similar to this? Or is there a way to attach and rotate the weapons In the Unreal engine itself and attach them to the HeroPPP model?
Sorry for bringing up a old subject, honestly this would have been alot easier if the Seller of those Weapon packs had adjusted them properly, it wouldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes to properly rotate and scale them to the Example projects.
I had no idea you could change the rotation and scale during the import menu in unreal. But I’m honestly needing to use these Models and animations in the First or third person templates, and I for the life of me, can’t find a single Tutorial on how to get custom weapons into the engine for the Templates, or from using them from SCRATCH. Any idea?
im not sure what the Sci Fi Silver Weapons Pack comes with, but i assume its either UAssets or FBX files that need to be imported as skeletal meshes and animations. I don’t think that weapons pack comes with any code for equipping weapons or integrating the weapons with the example projects, so you will probably have to make your own anim blueprint for each weapon type, as well as posing your character with AimOffset poses, so you can blend the upper body to aim in a different direction than you are walking.
you will need to create sockets on the skeletal mesh of your character for every place you want to attach things. so for a military character, you would have a socket on every holster, every pouch location, and on each hand. you will also probably want to set up TwoBoneIK nodes in your character’s Anim Blueprint.
then you need sockets on your weapon’s skeletal mesh ( again, i have no idea what the weapon pack comes with, but i will assume they didn’t set up all the sockets ). for a pistol, you would have a socket in front of the barrel for spawning muzzle flash particle effects, a socket on the slide so the IK on the hands will know where to grab when cocking the gun, and a socket on the magazine so your character can use IK while reloading. you might also have sockets to attach lasers, sights, grips, stocks, etc…
when you shoot a weapon, you are spawning a projectile at the MuzzleFlash Socket location, with an initial velocity based on your playerController’s ControlRotation (aka the rotation of the camera) or the rotation of the socket. in FPS games this is straight forward, but in third person, you may need to adjust the aim to go towards the middle of the screen.
when you reload a weapon, you set the leftHandIKEffectorLocation to the Magazine Socket Location then lerp the alpha value on your TwoBoneIk nodes, towards 1, which will make the hand reach for the Magazine. when the hand reaches the Magazine, you can attach it to the LeftHandWeaponSocket.
you should probably start by creating an Item actor that can be picked up, then making a weapon blueprint based on Item that has functions for attaching the weapon to the hands and reloading/Aiming/Firing functions, then making a shotgun Blueprint based on weapon, which defines how much ammo a shotgun has, fire rate, projectile type, muzzleFlashParticleType, reticle texture, UI Icon etc…
your custom PlayerController or your CustomPawnBase class can have references to Item and Weapon, but it should not have any pointers to specific child classes, like shotgun or pistol, because its more efficient to tell the Weapon class to reload, without knowing what kind of weapon is being used. the specific weapon blueprints can override the virtual functions in the weapon and item classes, defining custom functionality for a common interface that all weapons share.
FPS weapons usually have a separate Mesh LOD for first person and third person views, so you can have higher polygon counts for any weapons your character is holding. but i doubt that weapons pack came with any LODs.
weapons, vehicles, and characters are complicated systems that require alot of custom code and need to be designed to replicate efficiently over a network, so if you buy weapon props from an artist, they won’t be ready to play out of the box, and if you buy a weapons/inventory system from a programmer, you will probably get programmer placeholder art. so you might need to buy both and mix them, or find a weapons system made by a well rounded tech artist, who knows how to set all of this up and make it look pretty, but even then, it may need alot of adjustments to fit your game’s needs.