First Person vs Third Person in Multiplayer

Unity Engine
1

I am trying to learn a bit about unity in multiplayer games, I would like to have some directions the first person vs third person.

I have my main character, which is in first person for me, and in third person for the others players across the network.

I don’t know if I can use the same character model to represent the first person and the third person. They way I was thinking in accomplish this would create two cameras for the first person, one to render the word, and one to render the character with a very low death of view, that way I think I can see the arms of the character do stuff hitting or running.

This there anything bad about this approach?

The other way I can think of doing this would be have a two characters, one for third person that will be seen by the others players and one for first person that will have only arms and legs. The bad side of this is having to do two animations of everything and have to sync those animation over the network…

I am leaning, I know a bit more about 2d gaming, I new to the 3d world. Any though or ideas or direction of how to accomplish the goal of only using one character for both first person and third person would be very helpful.

2

Depends what art style you are going for. In games that go for more realism generally you’d use high detail arm/hand models in first person and not even include the rest of the model, since all the player sees is the arms and hands. In third person you’d use a more typical full body model, where the detail on the arms and hands isn’t significantly higher than the rest of the model. A lot of first person games use additional hand animation that you wouldn’t necessarily want another player to see in 3rd person, like hand sways, idle animation, etc.

In low poly games though, like minecraft syle art, there’s no need for high detail arms in first person.

3

So, the only reason for no using the same model for FP and 3rd person is quality of the animation?

I thought there was something else to this problem.

Thank you for the insights.