hi, i'm developing a fps engine game and now i'm coding the arm/hands animation and i'm new here x) i these current fps games, i see that the character and the player hold the weapon dynamicly, i mean, for each weapon, the player holds the weapon in a different way, reload, animate and this stuffs so, my idea was to create a arm with the bones ready to be movimented on-the-fly this is the arm model screen shot: then, i create a ArmManager class, witch modifies a struct called bone, with informations like target_angle to increase or decrease the bone to a position and a EventManager, to send to the ArmManager class a sequence of bone moviments like: sec 1: bone 1 rotate y 30 degrees sec 2: bone 2 rotate x 10 degrees (finger 1) sec 2: bone 3 rotate x 10 degrees (finger 2, all on same time) the question is there are a good technical to moviment bones on the fly in a fps style? (hold weapon, reload) or theses modern fps games just do a pre-animated arm model for each weapon ? here is a screenshot of my fps engine using Ogre3D + PhysX

Preanimated. Some sort of real time 3d hand animator seems like a giant waste of cpu time when it looks just as good to preanimate it. If its variance your after, get a bunch of preanimated reloads etc. up, and randomly cycle through them.

well it depends on your game, pre-animated works for most games that are just about shooting. I think inverse kinematics for the weapon manipulation would be awesome.

so i will do preanimated
tks =]

so, this is IK
i search now about it, blender does have it right? that IK options for bones, witch a child bone define the parent bone position and orientation

and FK, that a desired position for a determined bone, u calculate all the bones to reach that position.. amazing x)