I have a situation and I don’t know how to handle it.
Imagine I want a glove. The glove can be in the hand, therefore you make a mesh, weight paints it to the hand bones and you got it done. But now, you want an animation of putting the glove on. What do you do? Replicate the mesh, have its weight painted to a new set of bones only for being able to equip it? Can you use the same mesh and set of bones?
Now, let’s say it’s like a steampunk glove, and you want some kind of clock on the top part. What do you do then? Do you have a special rig animated for the clock? or is the clock part of the character rig, or what?
And finally, you want a new glove, with different characteristics, u can’t reuse any of the bones before?
The idea is being able to export that and use it on a Unity Game, therefore two armatures, one mesh doesn’t work.
Having animation of putting on a glove is a complex task even for pre-rendered video. Are you sure you even need that in the game? Even if it is a first person game, could just lower the hands out of view for a second, then swap models
Well, even in case you absolutely need it, having a different skeleton for just one type of glove is a bad idea. In both cases. For putting it on, you better create a static (not weighted to the hand) copy of the glove, and pose it with fingers outstretched, then give it a shape keys for “not worn” and “worn” states. After that, keyframe animate both the hand and the glove, and switch to rigged model of the glove at the last moment. For a clock, I think such features can be done using custom shaders. Define region of UV map where clock arrow is, then write a code in the shader to rotate it around a center
Normally this isn’t something you would animate. Ask yourself how often have you seen animations of people putting on gloves, or even looser, easier garments of clothing in videogames, or even full 3D movies/shows? For games, I think I’ve seen one big budget AAA bother, and it was a cutscene for a shirt. Normally at most there’ll be camera trickery to pretend it’s being done out of frame though, It’s not an easy thing to make look good, especially with tight clothing that is likely to want to clip, and hands have so many bones to deal with.
Typically, clothing changes in games just pop on, but if you want to fake putting it on, what you want to do is move the hand out of frame (or to a spot blocked from the camera’s view by the character’s body), have the other hand follow it like it’s putting the glove on out of frame, and have the arm for the hand applying the glove move to pretend it’s doing that. Sort of like the animations for applying bandages in most games: you don’t usually see a bandage actually get wrapped around a limb, there’s just some fakery to create the illusion it’s happening.
If you really, really have to include this, and you can’t talk anyone in charge of the project out of the need to include this (which you should try to do because trust me, you don’t want to animate this in game), maybe you could it with shapekeys? If you have the hand that’s being gloved hold perfectly still, and you’re very careful with the camera, maybe a shapekey for an glove off shape could be used to fake it?
Thank you for the answer. I will try to fake it as u said since it will look better and it will be easier. However, I must ask, how would you fake, as u said, the bandages?
An example of high-quality animation with similar kinds of interactions is on the TLOU2. I wonder there, how is the general rig, or workflow for all the weapons. All of them are attached to the backpack, following some smooth physics, but can also be removed and equipped seemingly (does that mean that the armature has a bone structure for each one of the weapons? or can they be completely independent?) Or furthermore, the backpack itself, is being equipped and unequipped easily in the frame.
How is all of that being done? Two bone structures? one attached to the main body where the equipped backpack sits and is being animated, and another one is used to extract? Maybe a single one with some bone constraints could do the trick. But I don’t know if I am expressing my confusion.
Most of the examples for weapons I’ve seen, or, they just create an independent blend file with its armature and instantiate in-game to the hand (which comes with later problems to sync all of it later)
Big games like that have custom scripts and engines that do game-specific tasks that would be very difficult to replicate outside of that game. You will struggle to get exact big studio game functionality in any 3D software, since that functionality wasn’t made in 3D software at all, it’s 99% likely a C++ script
Well, we can speculate endlessly how backpack and weapons in TLOU 2 is done. Both instantiating them on demand, or having them as permanent attachments to the character (only hidden) is technically possible. The problem here is not how you treat character attachments, but the complexity of the systems involved. What you describe requires active ragdolls + IK + keyframed animations, all seamlessly combined together through custom scripts. For any developer smaller than Naughty Dog, it not reasonable to spend so much budget and time on visual presentation gimmicks