Weapon animations! news - Grey mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Welcome!

In this news we'll show off some of the new animations we have in the mod as well some pictures about the model rigs. I'm not an animator so I've just worked with bones so far, moving them separately or maybe using some IK solvers. Yeah, the hand animations looked like that...

But now we gonna see some picture about proper rigging, a tutorial from Arby26 and a little video about the new hand animations.

I've use Blender 2.59 to make/set-up all models/animations so far. Since the original models of Grey were made in 3dsMax I found it easy enough to start on them in smd format as I've done with decompiled smds to mod L4D2 weapons. The few things I would need to remake with this method didn't take terribly long except for smoothing groups/hard edges.

I made my own changes to the mesh to make it deform better in all the ways I'd like to animate, mostly on the wrists and base of the thumb. I edited the vertex weights to their bones as well as subdividing+smoothing in extra polygons/loops to areas that would twist/bend, and to make it less blocky all around.

For the remade weapons, Magnumpi's meshes were easy to import and get ready to animate, no more rebuilding smoothing groups!

Here's what the rig/armature looks like after I added my dummy bones, constraints, and custom shapes to make the bones easy to see and manipulate without creating too many extra steps on exporting+compiling. Posed with Magnumpi's shotgun, and the old pistol which is still well-made:

I find the rig I made for Grey easier to work with than going back to my other weapon mod rigs. Nothing (within reason, of course!) is too hard to tweak if the current animations aren't quite there yet!

And now let's see how these weapon animations work in the mod.

Thanks for reading the news post, please keep checking our ModDB profile if you are interested in our modification - and please, support us by voting on Grey in the annual MOTY competition!
(Clicking the image below will bring you to the home page of this mod, make sure to vote there on the banner!)