Q. I created a custom skeleton in Milkshape. How do I get my weapons to animate with it?
A. Go through the following steps (in simplified form) to get your models working with your custom skeleton:
Create a 'template' skeleton based on your current custom skeleton. This would be a skeleton that doesn't have any faces, etc associated with it.
Import existing weapons (or whatever you're using for weapons) and delete whatever skeleton they have already & import your new skeleton into that weapon model.
Place the weapon model into the proper position (at the associated bone) and export the weapon, build actor etc
Update any ini/config files that RF needs to know about the 'bones' for so that RF knows about your new custom skeleton.
Q. I created different animations for my weapons - every weapon has now its own shoot, walk, run, aim etc animations - and some animations if the player has no weapon. But I can't get them to work. My player actor has the animations that should be used when the player has not got a weapon, every weapon has the anims for this certain weapon. But only the anims are played which are included in the player actor. What am I doing wrong?
A. All the animations have to be in the player actor, even those specific to a weapon. The weapon actor has no animations at all as it gets its info from the player actor. The animations you define in the weapon definition come from the player and not the weapon.
Q. Is it possible to use one animation for different actions (e.g. ShootUp=Shoot, ShootDwn=Shoot)?
A. A couple of things to remember while working on 3rd person weapon animations:
1. Never use the same animation for 2 different actions. The animation names assigned to those actions are used to determine if something has changed and duplicate names confuse things something fierce. You can use the same animation data but each action must have its own unique animation name. Instead of doing
ShootUp=Shoot
ShootDwn=Shoot
export the shooting animation as ShootUp and ShootDown then do
ShootUp=ShootUp
ShootDwn=ShootDown
Very little more work and things will work correctly.
2. All animations go in the player actor and never in the weapon actor. The reason for this is simple - the weapon actor recieves its animation information from the player actor so it will stay in sync.
3. When you define animations in PlayerSetup.ini these are the default animations that will be used at any given time. If you define animations in a weapon definition in Weapon.ini these will override the default animations whenever that weapon is active. So if you want the player to walk a certain way without a weapon define that walk animation in PlayerSetup.ini. If he walks differently when he is carrying a flamethrower then define that walk animation in the flamethrower definition in Weapon.ini. You don't have to have a complete set of animations for each weapon (although you can), just those that look different when that weapon is active.
