When should you use 1 armature vs multiple armatures for a fps character and multiple weapons

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1

Godot Version

4.4.1

Question

so i have this set of fps arms i made from my full character model and he has this axe gun thing weapon. made a bunch of animations involving the weapon and the arms but i have them on seperate armatures. was told later it was better to have them on one single armature. my idea for the weapon is that it would get attachments later on that let this single weapon function as multiple so while i can see why it would be fine in this case maybe for one armature in the case i add multiple weapons i was wondering if maybe i should make multiple armatures. what would be pros and cons to using a single armature vs multiple.generally for a single armature would i just have the weapon float offscreen when not in use or would i use some sort of code to despawn it. im very new to godot and my experince with this kind of stuff is messing around in unity so i have some familiarity with the coding side im still very unfamiliar with the majority of it.

2

Multiple armatures means more memory used up during gameplay.

You can hide and disable weapons not in use so even though they’re there, the player can’t see or use them, and they don’t affect the world. You’re making a FPS, so they will need to be hot-swapped. That means you don’t have enough time to create and destroy them when the player switches weapons.

3

makes sense. dont feel obligated to respond to this but figured i may as well ask if you have any prefered tutorials on merging armatures in a way that doesnt screw up the animations. rn dealing with irl stuff but when i get back to the grind ill probably be looking into tutorials for that. still want to experment with some things relating to the multiple armatures to understand some minor stuff with the nodes and filters but after that ill likely look into merging the armatures and not having to shift through the good tutorials and the rambling ones or the ones that dont pertain to what im looking for would be nice. that said dont feel you need to.

4

There’s more than one ay to do that. You could do the animations in a program like Blender or Maya before importing, or you could do it after importing. If you import animations, just make sure that you go into the AnimationPlayer select the Animation button and click Manage Animations. Then at the top of the animation list that appears, click the disk icon and select Make Unique.

To merge animations, just try copy and paste to start.