First Person Animations

Hello,

I'm working on a first person multiplayer game that features melee combat. After doing some research I found that most games have separate animations for what the player sees (first person) and what others see. I can understand how to actually implement this in Unity: by having a mesh that only shows the player's hands and only has animations specifically for first person, and another mesh that is fully animated so that other players can see what the player is doing. What I don't really understand, however, is how to actually find/create animations that are consistent in both perspectives.

For example, say I have a sword attack animation from here. As you can see, the animations are rather fast/abrupt, so simply attaching a camera to the model would not work, specially since the camera might not capture the key aspects of the movement, such as the sword's swing. How could I play those full animations for other players to see while playing a more first-person-friendly animation for the player? Would I have to create a brand new animation that closely resembled the third-person one? How could I make it consistent with the third-person while while still making it first-person-friendly? Is this more of an animation problem or a programming/logical one?

 

i think you will probably want to create your animations while looking at them from the desired view. also keep in mind that perspective parameters like field of view are very important for things that are close up in a first person view. a very common practice for the players gun in fps is for example to render it with a second camera so you can independently change the placement of gun/ arm and the perspective without changing your actual game camera. this video explains some of it. you might be right about needing to create 2 separate sets of animations for fps and 3rd person. since you are working on melee combat i guess the most important thing will be that the hit-boxes for the attacks are in the same position in both versions.