Rigging characters with weapons in maya

Unity Engine
1

I was taking a look at the hero male model provided in the tutorials section and i noticed that the gun’s he has are rigged to weapon bones in the model in maya. Is this the best way to rig up a character for a 3rd person game? What if you have multiple different weapons in your game, would you rig all of them up into the character model and swap their visibility through scripting? Or is there a way to have you props / weapons etc, seperate and have them constrained to a characters hand in unity instead.

thx

2

if you remember, bones are just transforms, thus you can parent the gun to the hand

3

If the props have animation on them, is it difficult to get their animation to line up with the main characters anim?

eg: reloading etc?

4

:\ if the gun has an animation, then just animate it separately from the player. If you need it to line up somehow, then you can set the normalized time value of the animation for the gun with the same normalized value of the player’s animation.