I am attempting to attach a weapon model to an Actor. I’d like to attach the weapon in two places - the left and right hand. I can expose both of those joints, but what’s the best way to do the attaching?
I am currently reparenting the weapon to the right hand and attempting to rotate the weapon to “fit” into the left but that seems like an unwieldy way to do it, especially when I expect the left hand to move around a lot with animations. Should my 3D guy put a bone in the weapon for the left hand to attach to? How would the attachment work?
Not sure I understand the question. Certainly, in order to put a weapon in the left hand, you have to have a joint that moves with the left hand to parent it to.
The particular orientation of that joint isn’t too important, as long as it’s consistent–that is, if the weapon ends up facing backwards when you attach it to the that joint, then you can just counter-rotate the weapon to point the right way (or create a sub-node that has this counter-rotation, and parent the weapon to that sub-node).
But if you’re saying you’re parenting the weapon to the right hand and translating it to make it appear that it’s in the left hand, that could only work if the right hand and left hand always move as a pair.
Yep, parenting and translating seemed like a short-sighted solution.
I suppose the question I’m really asking is - can I attach the weapon and actor models at more than one joint? How can I do that? Reparenting seems too restrictive.
The normal way to do something like this is to put left-hand and right-hand attachment nodes on your skeleton, transformed relative to the hands such that a weapon with an identity transformation appears correctly placed when directly attached to either one. I’m not sure what you mean by “reparenting seems too restrictive”, though… Other than setting the joint as the parent, how would you attach the weapon?
Attach it to one bone(right hand would be my choice). If you have some fancy animation’s where the weapon is held in the other hand only (like Conan the barbarian swinging a sword behind his back) or not held by any hand at all (like Jedi sabre throw) then make a separate bone just for the weapon (I wouldn’t even attach that bone to the rest of the bone hierarchy).
sneftel, the whole “take on every characteristic of the parent” thing seems… pushy. I have mostly dealt with 2D engines before. I am more of an AI guy than a 3D dev. Clearly, then, it’s the only way to attach (apart from the scarily newbie-warninged wrtReparentTo)?
A separate bone just for the weapon is what my modeler suggested. Fancy animations are what he’s shooting for.