Adding Bones To weapons

[dark583]

Myself and my teammate have had several issues regarding bone placement and animation in the UDK engine. So far can can add the 3 base bones from the grip to the muzzle get it inside the engine and it fully works but we want to do which is more complex animations such as reload. But after you attach the items into one object as per the Unreal Engine requirements for skeletal meshes we are unable to move or adjust the clip for reload animations or other animations and we are curious to know what is the best way to achieve complex animations in 3dmax 2012 for UDK.

[Graylord]

When doing bone animations, you don't animate seperate objects. You skin the objects to the bones and animate the bone.

For instance if you wish to animate the clip of the weapon, you need a bone for the clip. Everything that will be rigid only needs 1 bone each. You don't need one bone for the handle, one for the main part and one for the muzzle, (unless the weapon breaks apart and is to be animated as such). That's what sockets are for.

[dark583]

could you provide more info on the steps to skinning or any tutorials references you use for it? any help would be greatly appreciated. we know how to make the weaponfire, equip and basic animations with bones but the clip idea we just can't figure out how to get it working

[Graylord]

https://www.google.no/search?hl=no&s...g+and+skinning

[Graylord]

And that's what rigging and skinning does.

How to do it is described by the many tutorials the link I gave gives.

[dark583]

thanks, we're taking a look at it now i believe we figured it out

[dark583]

ok we we were to skin the gun and now we animate the clip. the clip has its own bone but fails to move when we export it from FBX to the unreal engine the reload anim is the only type of animation that we can export and put inside the unreal engine and it fails to work! it doesn't move at all

[Graylord]

First of all, make sure you have un-ticked the Anim Rotate only box in the animset properties.

Second, make sure the bone is linked to your root bone.

[dark583]

All Attached and Skinned placed in test posture to export as the base model.
\


inside UDK after export :*(

[geodav]

that looks like the ref pose, go to the anim tab at the top the select your animset to see what it looks like.

[dark583]

it does the same thing just the arms weapons tilt etc i don't know whats wrong

[Graylord]

Make sure the "Anim Rotation Only" box is not ticked.

[dark583]

Make sure the "Anim Rotation Only" box is not ticked.

I have tried with it ticked and not ticked the arms refuse to move i even reskined the entire gun and attached everything again >.>. but the gun will move no matter what attached the Max file a and FBX below as well
http://www.mediafire.com/?l9o57lmild...686dome1l1frhu

[dark583]

bump?
bump?

I have tried with it ticked and not ticked the arms refuse to move i even reskined the entire gun and attached everything again >.>. but the gun will move no matter what attached the Max file a and FBX below as well
http://www.mediafire.com/?l9o57lmild...686dome1l1frhu

bump?

[DT85]

I have the arms moving (using May 2012), just imported the provided FBX:



"Anim rotate only" is unchecked, but the arms still move just with no translation.

[JessieG]

Go to the Animation Compression in the top menu and recompress the animation.

[Inuyashua]

The New issue any ideas? whats the easiest way to make the arms match up and follow the gun on the left hand?

[jasonseabaugh]

Ideally you would have animated the skeleton to have his hands in the correct position per weapon, but you're using a stock character so what you're looking at doing is some modding and that's gonna get tricky.

I've never modded the LIAM cathode robot, but I do use the 3ds Max rig from the UDK documentation. It should have the same hierarchy, so you can animate the arms into the new weapon position and modify the default UT anim tree to use you new animation for the new weapon type... in theory.

Another option, I suppose you could use skeletal controllers to snap the Left hand to a socket on the gun via in-game IK.... but it will require scripting that I can't help you with. You would also have to make sure this snapping didn't interfere with other actions or that the controller script only activated when that gun was equipped.