Animating attachment points

[n00b]

Guy who pretty much knows nothing about modeling here

I'm using Mdlvis to animate, and I see that you can rotate attachment points which in turn rotates the attachment itself (obviously).

So, for example, say I want to make a unit twirl the weapon carried in his left hand. The problem I have is with the poor visual representation of how the weapon is oriented inside Mdlvis; I would keep having to import the unit model into a map just to see how it looks like in-game. Is there any way to make this less tedious?

(also, a weapon twirling animation doesn't sound that hard to make - this is mainly a problem for more complicated motions)

 

[Zwiebelchen]

Go to module --> Sequence editor and select "movement".

Select the bone you want to check (for example "Bone_Hand_R" ... I don't recommend twisting the weapon without the hand moving at the same time because it looks weird) then use "rotate" (R).
The Gizmo will appear and display the sphere and three short lines which are color-coded. Red is X axis, Green is Y, blue is Z.

The weapon will always be orientated in the direction of the red line. The blue line always points upwards (if the character is holding an axe, the blade of the axe will always show in the opposite direction of the blue line). The direction of the green line is then determined already. It should point inwards (towards the body of the unit) for the right hand and outwards (away from the body of the unit) for the left hand.

So you can check the direction of the Gizmo helper lines to view the orientation of your weapon throughout the animation process.

Make sure you are in rotation mode (R). In translation mode (M, Q), the arrows will show in different directions.

 

[n00b]

Actually, those helper lines are exactly what I meant when I was talking about "poor visual representation". Up until now, I've just been slapping on weapon geosets to the unit model itself and animating from there. In comparison to the helper lines, this method seems to have more visual reliability

The problem with my method: there doesn't seem to be a way to independently rotate the weapon attachments in Mdlvis since the weapons are tied to bones. I would think the solution would just be to make the weapon geosets tied to the attachment points instead (if this is even possible???), but this doesn't seem to be an option with Oinkerwinkle's geoset merger

tl;dr how do I make geosets tied to attachment points instead of bones

 

[Deolrin]

You could create a dummy bone, attach a test geoset to it and copy its transformations to the attachment point later.

 

[Freddyk]

What i usually do is creating a bone as parent of the attachment. Then i import a weapon geoset linked to this bone, and i animate the bone. Since the attachment is child to the bone it will follow. When finished you just have to remove the weapon geoset.

 

[n00b]

What i usually do is creating a bone as parent of the attachment. Then i import a weapon geoset linked to this bone, and i animate the bone. Since the attachment is child to the bone it will follow. When finished you just have to remove the weapon geoset.

This seems like the best option for me

Is there a way to change the bone that a geoset is attached to?