I have a human model that I’m using for a computer game. I’ve made a walk cycle for it and some other animations, but I was wondering, eventually he’s going to have to be holding various types of weapons and wear various types of armor. Is there a way that I can change the weapon/armor that the model is holding/wearing without going through all the work of redoing the animation? Any help is greatly appriciated. Thanks!
I don’t use BGE, but you can definitely “parent” the gun to a bone in the hand, which will cause the gun to follow the hand. You’ll need to adjust the object center and/or the offset to make it work. If the armor is non-deforming (e.g. plate armor of some kind) you could do something similar – e.g.: parent the forearm armor to a forearm bone, etc.
Do be aware that different weapons are held in different ways – compare a handgun (two-handed grip around the single handgrip) to a rifle or SMG (one hand on the trigger, one hand on a grip further down the barrel). Different weapons will have the grip points in different places. So you’ll probably need to make one animation set per weapon. Again, I don’t know if this works in the BGE, but if you’re using NLE strips as in traditional animation, you could have the walk cycle separated from whatever the hands need to do (walk-cycle strips only key the lower body, various weapon-manipulation strips only key the upper body).
Note that in most older FPS games (haven’t looked at modding anything newer than HL2, but I imagine it’s similar), the FPS-view hands/forearms were modeled and animated as part of the gun model. In other words, the whole model (including hands) would be switched when weapons were switched).
Awesome thanks for the help!!