Locking weapons with animation sequence?

[TTV/AlecGunter]

I'm trying to lock a weapon to a scout during the running sequence. This is really a two part question:

1. How do I get both hands to lock to the weapon at the same time?
2. How can I make it so that the weapon moves with the scout during the running sequence?

[R234]

You forgot to apply the zero preset to the gun's locked bones.

[TTV/AlecGunter]

Originally posted by R234:

You forgot to apply the zero preset to the gun's locked bones.

Lol sorry I just edited the question, didn't think i would get an answer so quickly.

[R234]

oh, well les'see:

1- Technically the running sequence is already set up to make it look like both hands follow the gun correctly, so if you simply lock and zero the gun to the weapon bone it should look fine out of the box.

With Source's complex animation system and general inaccuracies in the samples it's not always perfect, so if you notice some movement of the left hand, you can apply an IK rig to the model, lock the left hand to the right hand and apply the playhead filter to the left hand. I tend to have to do that with the Heavy's minigun firing sequence for instance.

2- Like I said, once the weapon is locked to the character's weapon_bone, just apply the zero preset to the weapon's locked bone(s).

[TTV/AlecGunter]

Sorry, I'm new to sfm and I'm obviously still doing something wrong still. When you say "lock and zero the gun to the weapon bone" should I be locking the root transform of the gun to the weapon bone, or the weapon bone of the gun to the weapon bone of the scout?

[TTV/AlecGunter]

OH MY GOD you're the guy who made the rabid heavy taming engineer on youtube! dude i love that video watched it like 100 times. I'm A1BROS on youtube and I subscribed to you, cant wait to see more vids form you dude

[R234]

There's a few ways of going about it.

The "proper" way, being the one TF2 actually does it, is to lock all of the weapon's bones to the same-named bones on the character model, and ignoring those that are unique to the gun (i.e. muzzle, eject_brass, etc.), and then applying the zero preset to the bones you locked. This almost always work fine, though sometimes it can cause a few oddities in the weapon's animations.

Then there's the simplified method of only locking the weapon's weapon_bone to the character's weapon_bone, and zeroing it. Works rather well, but sometimes the weapon's illumpositiondag (the point which the weapon uses to calculate its lighting, basically) is bound to the roottransform, so that can make the gun's lighting act strange.

My personal favouite is to lock the weapon's roottransform to the character's weapon_bone, and zero both the weapon's roottransform and weapon_bone. I think that's the best all-around solution, and it gives you better control over the weapon's finer details, like the minigun barrels.

There's even some weapons that don't quite behave like that, and require additional tweaking, like zeroing of another bone or the likes. Those are moslty the exception though (the Phlogistinator is one of them I believe).

[epic lego yoda]

thank you so much @TTV/AlecGunter for asking and @R234 for answering this