Hiding dock weapons

[TheJamsh]

Is it possible to hide 'docked' weapon geometry when its not selected?

im thinking in the region of pilots really... i have a custom training centre with terminal access of course whereby i want to customize pilot weapons.

any possible way of hiding weapon gemoetry when its assigned weapon isnt in use? if not it would be a nice little fix to slap in... cant be difficult can it?

[mrtwosheds]

Sounds tricky, what are you trying to do?
If you are trying to use two model weapons, in one 2mode gun, then I can think of one way to do what you want using animation.
You could have both models present (as one model) with one in the held position in combat mode and the other on the pilots back, when the player switches to assault mode you could swap them over with the deploy animation.
This would look cool and probably not be too difficult animate.

[Warfreak]

Acutally, its VERY easy.

All you have to do is animate the dock hp, it will move the gun with it..... would take trial-error basis to make flawless but it is VERY worth it.
To HIDE unused weapons..... your best bet would be to move the hp underground,vert animate it to the point it has "shrunk" out of sight, OR whatever anyone else comes up with

[mrtwosheds]

That would mean altering the pilot model.
I was thinking more of animating a gun model, with two gun meshes off of the root, rotate one up 90 degrees and back a bit and the other in the opposite direction, might look a bit weird as it would go through the pilot, but if you did it quick that might not matter.

[bigbadbogie]

Just have that as the cockpit animation, and have a single frame one for the pilot that just swaps it in a split second with the other gun.

If you are really clever you could possibly make it so that the weapon you arent using appears on the pilot's back, like in halo 3.

[TheJamsh]

darn... well anyone fancy giving me a notepad animation tutorial on how to put weapons on the pilots back ???

i dont mind changing the pilot model, or making a new animation for him... thats fine aces with me, but everything will get done in notepad if at all seeing as blender animations dont export yet. plus i havent got that far with blender atm...

i could get them to swap out and turn invisible like on UT or something...

[bigbadbogie]

If vtex animation is added to OMs exporter, I see no problem with that at all.

[Warfreak]

My methods work with only custom pilots..... WHICH PEOPLE SHOULD BE MAKING!!!

I've always hated the stock pilots..... they look like they should't be able to survive out of their ships.

[mrtwosheds]

i dont mind changing the pilot model, or making a new animation for him...

All my attempts to modify vertex animations in notepad have resulted in brain melting confusion and horribly distorted models.
What you need to consider is that your weapon will at some point probably be used by a stock Pilot model, so I have always found it best to design weapons that work with them, and make new pilots along the same general design.
All this means in practice is that the positions of hp_dock, hp_hand and to some extent hp_eyepoint should be the same (relative to each other) on all pilot models. Then they should be able to use any gun without problems.

An animation to rotate and move a weapon would not be difficult to create in notepad. It could be done with just a few lines.

[TheJamsh]

i dont really mind tbh... although i would like some new pilots i just havent read how to do animations yet in blender anyway... so even im OM's exporter does work i wont be at that stage jsut yet. plus any model i IMPORT into blender gets mangled and loses all its specific XSI information like heirachy and object names... PAIN

[Warfreak]

That happens in 3DS MAX too..... so i have to pull up 3dExploration to look at the heirarchy tree to put everythign back in place, rotate everything by 90 degrees, and reapply textures                         (i manage to export UV mapping). When all that is done, i hurry up and save a .max of it for later use. 

[TheJamsh]

i think UV mapping exports if i use the lightwave file importer...