HELP: Weapon Reloading (was Help Wanted)

[Lyberta]

I have the new hand mesh all textured and 80% rigged, so importing the current weapons and getting them in game isn't that much of a deal if it wasn't for the dreadful amount of (mostly reload) animations that have to be recreated.

I was asking about technical problems doing animations.

Thus I strongly advocate for getting rid of the unneeded reload animations and opt for the more logical and extendable system proposed above.

No, some kind or "reload" or whatever animation is necessary, otherwise what would reload key be for? And particles only won't do.

[Julius]

No technical problems per se, but it is a difficult task to make them look nice and at least as far as I am concerned I don't really have the animation skill-level to do that quickly (and I don't see anyone else in this community who does either for now).

When I talk about reload animation I mean basically the left hand coming up to the screen and interacting in some sort of complex way with the weapons and especially those that involve removal of a part (like a magazine) or any kind of such manipulation of the separate 1st person weapon mesh.

A simple reload animation like a weapon tremor with some emitted particles is no problem, and for weapons that have the right hand visible a simple thumb movement like as if reaching for a weapon safety switch or something like that could be added quite easily too I guess.

[greaserpirate]

Julius, would it be possible to use the new hands and simpler anims for the rifle and plasma but keep the old hands for the SMG and other weapons with really good animations? Although the new hands might look better, the old hands look fine as they are, and recreating the smg anims seems like a ton of work. There's just something really powerful about the SMG reload that makes the game seem a lot more dynamic, and you can tell a ton of work was put into it. Same goes for the pistol, though to a lesser extent.

[Julius]

Hmm... I guess the current setup would make that difficult, especially if everything goes as expected and the new weapon and arm models are in the .iqm format as well.

Personally I would rather have some cool jump an movement animations for the left hand (similar to how it is done in Mirror's Edge; at least for the smaller weapons that you can hold with one arm) to supplement the new visible 1st person legs, than sticking with the static weapon holding and reload animations (and mixing those two kind of animations, while possible, is probably a nightmare to make look good).

P.S.: I don't have moderation rights in this sub-forum, but maybe it would make sense to split this topic?

[greaserpirate]

Personally I would rather have some cool jump an movement animations for the left hand (similar to how it is done in Mirror's Edge; at least for the smaller weapons that you can hold with one arm) to supplement the new visible 1st person legs, than sticking with the static weapon holding and reload animations (and mixing those two kind of animations, while possible, is probably a nightmare to make look good).

That could be an interesting idea, but it sounds like a lot of work. If you can do that though, you can certainly recreate the reload anims

[Julius]

The question is: do I want to create some mundane weapon reload anims when I can create exciting free-fall base-jumping kind of animations

As I said before, it is less a question of being generally able, but being motivated to invest the the time to do it.
Technically it is not that difficult, but since I only did very few of those animations before (and that is actually a long time ago... for a quake3 mod ) it will take me a lot of trial and error, or lets say "iterative improvement steps" to come up with something acceptable.

I am not sure if I even find the motivation to do any animations at all... I have been procrastinating on finishing the rig for a long time already

Edit: thanks for the topic split btw!