Mounting Weapons

Questions & Answers
1

Hey all,

I'm trying to have my TPS character model "pick up" weapons and hold them correctly. Currently I can "drop" the weapon but when I try to reparent it I'm not seeing any bones from the upper body in unity3d.

So I have a few questions (sorry) bundled into one here:

  1. My thought was that I'd have a separate model for the guns (an AK74 and sci-fi rifle for testing) from the character model. But what is a good way to "mount" these correctly? I was thinking that if I had two "mount pt" bones in the hands of the character then have two "mount pt" bones in the gun model and attach them (i.e. one bone at trigger, one bone at stock). Is this a reasonable approach?

  2. My model appears to have the rifle sub-mesh as part of the 3d model itself, so I'm wondering if there is a basic fully rigged and animated "blockman" I can use which uses the approach mentioned above? Something like Torque included. That or even a good model which has a basic human than can be "dressed" using separate objects such as mounting hats, weapons, etc....

Are there other, more efficient/simple approaches to this problem I'm missing? It occured to me that I could just use local x,y,z positions and create a "Gun" class that encapsulates this information for mounting but that seems less in keeping with unities typical approach of minimizing code config, etc...

TIA!

2

Alright, well I choose to use joints to accomplish this. Then developed all model assets to assume a pose (typically t-pose) and orient the weapon so that it would fit in hand with this pose. After that, parent a joint in the weapon handle and apply the local rotation of the characters hand "mount" joint to the weapon and voila! - it lines up how you have set things up with your models :).