Knife replacement, obviously.

so i have a retarded way of animating. apparently the way i do it is completely different from the textbook style of animating. traditionally, animations are done from start to finish and the animator goes and does everything in a linear fashion, so to speak. what i mean by this is that you go and make the gun come up and have the hand reach for the mag, and then the mag drops out and you animate the mag falling out and the hand sticking a new one in, and so on and so forth, and the sequence everything gets animated along as the sequence goes.

the fucked up method i use takes a completely different approach. i do one thing at a time and animate it the entire way through the sequence before going to the next thing thats supposed to move. for example, i almost always start by making the entire body of the gun move first and i animate it for the entire sequence before i make the mag or hands or fingers move. in doing this i have to visualize what everything else around it looks like and imagine the sequence as if the other bones were already animated too.

the reason i do this is because if something doesnt work right or the timing is off or i decide i need an extra 10 frames at the end to smooth it all out, it's SO much easier to fix when all i have to fix is that one bone that moves, whereas if i had already animated EVERYTHING then decided to make these changes i would have to go back and edit every bone's timing and slide all the keyframes down and make them match the way they originally were again, and it's just too complicated and i've found it hard to get it to look the same way after the edit

so i decided to reveal this secret along with my latest wip of the aug animations. this video shown below is the actual thing i had at the time i'd started with my retarded method was rendered BEFORE i'd finished the rest of the sequence (so basically NO i didnt cheat yall and finish animating the aug then just deleted the keyframes for every bone except the main body of the gun). as you can see, i try to finalize the guns movements before making the rest of the stuff move, and if you use your imagination then you can watch it and get a feel for how the rest of the things will fall in place and what the final result will look like

so i hope some people found this information useful, or at the very least interesting. it makes animating a lot easier for me, and i encourage other people to try this style some time and use it if they find it as useful as i do. but more power to ya if you prefer the textbook method instead lol, just whatever works best for you :)

and this will be the last skin i release for now. i'm planning on writing up a lot more animation tutorials that cover some basic and advance tips and tricks to use, as well as how to position hands and just all that sorta stuff, so cheers! :)