Someone once asked me why nobody has tried to make 3rd person weapon animations as detailed as 1st person animations. Model animation is not my specialty, so now im curious to what the answer is. Does anyone know?

By more detailed, do you mean more bones? As in, if third person had fingers, etc?
Well, very few people do third person animation. I think it's because it's harder than first person... you have to make the whole body move realistically from all angles, and not just a small field of view of just arms, like in fp. There are also many more 3p animations than fp animations.
Also, there is a 64 bone limit.
Edited by SlappyThePirate on Jul 21, 2011 at 11:16 PM

Makes sense. Im just trying to create the most realistic map possible: http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm%3Fpage=topic&topicID=38303

I think you could fairly easily get bones into the hands and still be within the bone limit, however I get the impression this would involve redoing the entire third person animation set, as you are using a new skeleton...! I'm no expert, so don't quote me on that, but either way it would still look very impressive. Just maybe more work than it's worth.

Professional artists in this community are few and far between; I don't think I would be wrong if I said that most animators in this community have had little to no formal training in 'traditional' animation... and to go a bit further, I'd say that most skills that are found in this community (modeling, animation, level design, the newfangled position of "shaderer") were born out of necessity to get things done, as opposed to people coming in with those skills already present.

Third-person animation (or, what most actual animators do 99% of the time) requires a fair bit more knowledge as to how things move. There is not much pressure on people or mod teams to make custom 3p animation; to date I think only Jarhain's Link biped and the CMT Brutes are the only publicly available bipeds in the community featuring what could be called a complete custom set of animations.

Thus, people don't really develop the skills needed to create really good character animations and... the result is that the products that do come out aren't very refined. It's not an issue of simply "making" things more "detailed" - I think there's a skill barrier that our community hasn't broken yet. Certainly I haven't.

(There is also the practical issue of making things in 3p animate like they do in FP - where do magazines go and where do they come from? Character and weapon animation is necessarily separated in third person; how do you make sure it all matches up? The problems go on...)
Edited by teh lag on Jul 22, 2011 at 11:31 AM

I'd agree with Lag and I'd add that adding bones to the fingers would only further complicate things for people with an already underwhelming amount of experience. I worked to rig a Spartan 2's fingers once, and I got fairly far with it (it's certainly within the bone count limit). But after nearly attaining said goal, I came to the realization that it would simply be too much for me, at least so early in my animation "career" in Halo CE. I do plan to one day finish the rig, and possibly port the rigged model for use in a more complicated engine such as Cryengine (it's a Halo 3 model, so about the same era as Crysis 1). I do hope though, to use it for animations in Custom Edition for a while just to show it can be done; I only need more time to learn.

PS: I do not support finger-rigged bipeds for use in-game, but it would be quite cool in cutscenes which is the purpose I had in mind for mine. I only animate cutscenes.
Edited by The Cereal Killer on Jul 22, 2011 at 12:02 PM

I do remember during my traditional animation course, possibly the most difficult thing to achieve (as a newbie) was a convincing walk cycle. Was really good fun though; I wanted to do that before all the Universities denied ALL of my applications. Wankers.

What about professional game developers like Bungie? In the normal non-cutscene bipeds the fingers don't animate. I might be wrong because like many other people, I don't look too closely at 3p animations in-game.

I think that can be attributed more to technological limitations during the game's development; Halo 2 and above of course had animated fingers on the bipeds.