Research and Development. Animating in Blender!
For my research and development, I studied how to rig and animated in Blender. I've chosen to model and rig a WW1 Vickers light Machine gun. My main source of research and information was the youtube channel "Forgotten arms" where I saw shots around the gun, as well as, how it fired. (https://youtu.be/HSG2Flnc1Rs) Another source was vbbsmyt's "Vickers Mk1 1914" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG2YfcAJrtU) video. Even though this video was a indepth model and animation of the interior of the gun I learnt a lot from watching how the Vickers function and how I can apply it to my own studies.
For this study about animation, I had to skip a few industry pipelines such as unwrapping, texturing/bake, and high to low poly retopology.
For the future I would like to take my gun to be put into unreal engine with its rig and animation.
Made the animation by adding key key frames and then smaller frames in between.
Found a plug-in that allowed curve splines to be animated and created a firing animation.
I've started off a Cylinder and added high poly divits. Then I block off the body of the gun according to my reference.
I made an optional interior section to the gun in the case that I would need to model the inside.
Made the feeder to the body of the gun.
Added some more details such as the handel of the gun and the operational handle.
Made Bi/Tri pod attachment.
Made the Bi/Tri pod legs.
Use a curve modifier in blender to attach and array bullets onto a belt.
Created a basic rig
Thought of using an IK or contraint modifiers to make sure the gun can rotate in certain angles.
Progress on the pivot pitch handle.
Created an animation controller.