I decided to record a video tutorial on how to do first-person animations. It will be part of the Halo Modding Complete Tutorial Series.

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/halomodtesters/videos

Part 1: Summary
Part 2: Energy Sword Example

I'm going to redo the first tutorial and have it just be a single tutorial for first person and third person animations.

I don't quite understand what first person animations mean?

First person means the weapons that you see while playing normally. third person means the weapons you see other people holding.


you see the gun that "you" are holding? that's the first person model. the guns the other dudes are holding are third person models.

It gets pretty silly if you swap third person with first person and vice versa. Usually swapping first person with third person causes it to not work, but in some cases, it looks incredibly low detailed and/or buggy. When you swap third person for first person, it often looks weird when you hold the weapon or when it's on the floor.

I'll have to give your tutorials a look.

They should both be hyphenated, "First-Person" (FP or 1P) and "Third-Person" (3P). The terms come from the language perspectives of first person, "I" and "we", the second person, "you" and "you all", and the third person, "he, she, it" and "they".

When you add a completely different item to be held, the tags you must develop are:

- first-person model(s) of the object
- third-person model(s) of the object (this can be a duplicate of the fp model(s), or it can be a lower-quality model with fewer polygons)

The detailed objects, those with more polygons, are the objects that are closer to the camera, the FP models. The same principle applies to Levels of Detail (LODs).

- first-person animations of the biped's arms holding the object (what you see in first-person view)
- third-person animations of the biped's body in several engine-supported movements, like crouching, jumping, turning, running, and getting hit or stunned from four different directions and at different locations on the body

The third-person animations are typically reused because the Halo engine is only supporting 256 or 257 (but that's the breaking point) animations per model_animations tag. This is why, for example, the flamethrower uses the sniper right reloading animation in third person.

The first-person and third-person things don't have to match; what you see from your perspective and what you see the other cyborg model doing does not have to be the same; neither the models nor the animations must appear the same between perspectives. Each perspective's model and its animations must have the same node count, though, which is like a checksum for telling the engine that the animations match that model and so the model will animate.

The rest will be in the video tutorial when it's redone.