Quote: "you don't really rig a weapon (well, unless it was a weird gooey moving one with tentacles flapping) you can just animate separate elements of the weapon with normal move/rotate animation, as long as its all linked together in a hierarchy, its all good
the only thing that should need bones should be the hands if you decide to do any.
Ive come to a stage where im making a bunch of short (somewhat crappy) picture tutorials for my site, and i might make a quick one for weapon animation soon."
Generally speaking for DX mesh you can use one of two types of animation.
Reference Templates (i.e. moving each part individually) or Skin & Bone (i.e. skeleton based animation)
Personally don't know anyone who still uses the old reference method. The trick to making sure you don't get "swimming polygon" like from Quake2, is to basically set each joint to rigidly attach to the vertices you want it to.
How you do it really is up to you though.
Personally for weaponry, I tend to use a physics model now with key elements (stock, clip and unjammer pin) being tagged entities that hands affect.
This let's each aspect to basically animate real-time based on what the real-motions of the weapon are; but then again FPSC doesn't really have such a nice feature included.
Personally I'd suggest a joint system with IK in the important parts; then once you've finished animating use XForm to prep it for outputting to DirectX via skin&bone.
but that's just what i'd do.
half-life uses a similar system for it's animations; but then again quake 3 used a frame system (which can be achieved with matrix transformation animation.. not sure if dbp supports this yet)
be alot simplier with a tag system mind, imo
