Right so, I’m a bit confused as to the theory here. I have no problem making animations, but I don’t understand how they are handeled in-engine.
I know you can attach a gun class to a socket of the character armature.
I just don’t know how I am supposed to animate everything…
Do I use a different animbp for the arms for each gun? New arm skeletal mesh to properly export per-gun animations? How do I synchronize gun firing and reload animations with the hands? If I animate the gun and hands together, will the animated gun transform be relative to the socket in ue4 and therefore appear detached from the gun?
If somebody could just post a start-to-finish process of making interchangeable animations from the same pair of hands that appear accurate in first person, that’d be great.
I’d rather have a single skeletal mesh for the character that works in third and first person.
Thank you so much! I posted this in a much more confusing format a few weeks ago and nobody responded so…
Thanks!!!
nobody has responded to any of these…? Please?
If it’s a stupid question, could someone just point me in the right direction???
I’m really struggling here and I’d appreciate it greatly…
I’m not at my computer at the moment to post a pic but for reloading and running and aim down sight animations to work it’s very simple, create the blendspace or bone manipulation however you want to do it, then in your player character for example when you hit reload( say R on the keyboard) have it set a Boolean to true (name it whatever you want) then in your animation blueprint, off a cast to character(your character blueprints name) have it call the Boolean from there and have it used there to a branch and have it do what ever you wanted it to, like doing a reload animation, I will post a few pics when I get home in a few hours I probably didn’t make any sense with this heh.
Right, this isn’t so much a question of how to execute animations in an anim blueprint, it’s how to setup a system in which animations are executed based on weapon type (simple with enumerators) but the question is truly more about how to make the animations so they work with the system…
Is the gun attached to the hand? Is it attached in ue4 or exported as skeletal mesh with groups in blender? Is left hand IK’s to the gun/magazine and if so, do I animate the magazine and does it move relative to the gun? If the gun is part of the hand model and i do everyhing as part of the hands (animations and whatnot), do I export different skeletal meshes for each gun and their animations? Master animation blueprint or smaller bp’s for each skeletal mesh?
Etc etc. I know how basic animations work, it’s the overall concept here of interchangeable guns that I’m not sure how to tackle as part of the arms, separate, etc…
Thank you so very very much for the response anyways, as it means a great deal to me and I appreciate it infinitely, but I hope this comment gives you a better understanding of what the question is…
ah, well thats a little more indepth than i know, in so far as the gun, i’ve seen it done both ways, one that is attached to the character all the time (and just a bunch of different child actors of the main character, with different guns) and the other being a weapon class, with each class being a different gun, so as far as helping you with the animation side of hooking that in, i dont know, havent got that far in scripting my character yet
Ok well thanks anyways… I really appreciate the comments, as, on the multiple question threads I’ve created over the past few weeks for this exact issue, you are among the only to respond and for that I am forever grateful 
your welcome, i wish i could help ya out more… hopefully someone will know the answer to your questions 