[WIP TUTORIAL] Creating anim for RE weapon

[LuckyStrike-Rx]

Hello, I just spend 1h to write this mail to someone that want to makes animation for RE weapon.
I thought about recycling it into a tutorial. You need to know the blender basics first.

This is how to proceed in the 1rst place.

First you need the Red Eclipse player hand and the model you want to animate.

1. you have to attach the weapon to a Rig.
Magazine vertex attached to the magazine bone, etc..

2. You have to create a constraint to the tag_handle bone that attach it to the Weapon bone of the Arm rig. then move the postion of tag_handle in pose mode to make sure it's in the hand, and add a keyframe (on the 1rst frame).
(see the pistol.blend)

3. You have to make the idle position for the hand in pose mode.

4. Now you have to export each model anim separated (hands and pistol)
Erase the weapon model and it rig, make sure you select the hand and the rig in object mode, make sure that the current action is the hand one, then export to md5 (for hand, you just need to export the md5anim.

Then undo to recover the weapon mesh, erase the hand and it rig, remove the constraint, reset the tag_handle position to 0 0 0, update 1rst keyframe, export the weapon md5mesh and md5anim.

You will have to do this each time you want to export a new animation.

5.Once you have exported the 2 md5anim (hand and weapon) and the mesh (weapon), you have to find the RE config folder in "Username"\Library\Application Support\redeclipse\models on macOS
MyGame/Red Eclipse on windows
and create a models folder similar than the one in program folder.

Then, in weapon, replace the 'weaponname'.md5mesh by the new one, and the 'weaponname'_idle.md5anim.

In actor, you will replace hud_'weaponname'-idle.md5anim by your anim.

6.make sure for then weapon that the mdlscale is 1680 (same scale as the hands)
mdlscale 1680

7.Launch the game to see, the weapon will be most likely be out of hand. you'll have to move it with
mdltrans 0 -0.4 0.12
(it's x y z)
You have to change this, save the cfg, then restart the game to see the result until the weapon is right where it should

After this, creating the other anim should be piece of cake, just export the hand and weapon md5anim and place them in you model folder
More about model .cfg here : http://sauerbraten.org/docs/models.html

[Wazubaba]

Thanks for posting this tutorial

This will probably help me out a lot !

One thing of note, there is an IQM exporter for blender, as from what I have seen, 2.5 + doesn't seem to support MD5 export.

The exporter can be found here :
http://lee.fov120.com/iqm/

[LuckyStrike-Rx]

MD5 exporter for 2.49 and 2.59
http://www.katsbits.com/tools/

you have to use blender 2.49 to import any md5, that's why i posted the hand file.

If you want to use iqm it should work the same (exept the hand have to stay in md5, exept if you port the entire player/hwep thing to iqm)
But I suppose you can have the hand in md5 and the weapon in iqm.