What is your guy’s thoughts on a route to take for using various optics along with iron sights (for a FPS shooter). What I mean by that is lets say I have an m4 based rifle with just iron sights. I animate the rifle for things such as idle/ADS/Firing and such in blender for the iron sights and bring it into UE4 and set it up. How i set it up for aiming is with anim montages and I shoot out of the muzzle bone (where the projectile would spawn or line trace depending on what I’m doing). What would be a good way to go about setting it up to work with various optics such as a red dot/holo or magnified optic. With the magnified optic it will be sitting higher than the iron sights were unless I made a super low base for the scope to sit in which would look weird. The red dot/holo would probably be ok as the height would be co-witness with the irons, but I’m not sure how to account for the height of the scope so that its centered in my screen and I’m assuming that creating a separate animation for it with each attachment is not the correct way to tackle this problem. Do i create a camera or something near the stock of the rifle to look through the sights? How I create ADS animations in blender is I have a crosshair X distance away and line the sights up manually to that crosshair so the rifle/pistol will be moved to the camera and I would like to keep it this way as IMO it looks the most natural.
The next question I have is what would you guys do to set the point of impact for the firearm? For example lets say I wanted to be able to zero the rifle at various distances such as 25/100/200 yards, what would be a route to go for that? My first assumption was to get the point in space from the optic/iron sights that goes straight out X distance (lets say 25 yards for now) so that way I have a point in space thats 25 yards infront of the rifles sights. Then use that point in space to calculate the vector (maybe FindLookAt?) to find the direction from the muzzle to that point in space on the vertical (pitch?) axis and fire the projectile so that the projectile starts below the sights and is gradually going up until it intersects the sights (pretending a horizontal line going from your sight picture) at 25 yards and continues to travel above the sights until it comes down and intersects the sights again at X distance (like m193 would intersect again somewhere around the 300-350 yard mark). What route would you guys suggest I take here? Am I on the right track?