Weapon tags

[Martinus]

Anyone knows how should I edit the weapon tags (weapon_hand) in Milkshape 3D?
If someone of you knows it, that would be cool.

[Martinus]

So?

[Bacon]

What exactly are you trying to do? Re-position stock weapons in the players hand? Or a new weapon? You can't really just edit the existing ones because there are animations tied to it.


Here's some info I sent to another q3w member on this subject mabye it will help:

Weapon animation is controlled by _hand.md3 (machinegun_hand.md3, shotgun_hand.md3, etc). This model controls where the gun is placed in first person, and also has the animation for the gun dropping/raising, and firing.

Frames 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 are the guns firing animation, and frames 8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 are the frames for dropping and raising. What you want for frames 8-16, is the guns rest position at both 8 and 16, and the guns lowest point when dropping to be at frame 12.

To animate it, just add a single bone to the gun model, with the tags parented to the bone, and export the bone with the tags, but not the gun model itself, for _hand.

Example:

Machinegun.md3 is just the gun mesh, and the tags, with no animation data, and no bone exported.

Machinegun_hand.md3 is the tags and the bone, WITHOUT the machinegun mesh in the file. So all that is in this md3 for machinegun_hand would be tag_weapon, tag_barrel, tag_flash and the bone. You want to export both models the same scale, but for _hand.md3, you can offset the x/y/z to whatever you want, to move the gun in the first person camera. The easiest way to figure out what offsets you want, is to load the game up with cheats enabled, and change cg_gunx, cg_guny and cg_gunz until you find a position you like. Then when you export, those numbers you used for x,y,z, you can use as the same numbers for exporting _hand.md3, in the offset fields.

[Martinus]

Yes, I have my own guns, and I need to re-pose them.
I also have a chaingun replacement weapon (a deserved better looking one for the chaingun), with rotary tubes, and that need a re-edit for the tubes positions.
Can I modify somehow a _hand.md3 file by moving the tag points without losing the animation?
Posing the meshes in the models hands is easy.

Thank you for your reply, and for being helpful Bacon, but I think I need to learn more about model animation, to create my own _hand.md3 animations (that's why I only want to modify or edit an aviable one).

[Bacon]

I'm 99% sure that animations are "baked" into md3 format, so you can't just edit them without losing the firing & switching animation. You could still move the tags around though probably. I'm not familiar with MilkShape so I can't help you there. You should be able to import the _hand.md3 and there should be 3 tags in it.

[Martinus]

Milkshape is not that bad, but yeah, there is some thing, what it can't handle, like quake model animations, and tags...
Which editor should I use then, to see all of these stuffs?