FPS Weapon Animation
Role:
Animator, Gun Rigger
Software:
Unreal Engine 5.5
Duration:
2 weeks
Rig by:
Gun rig by me
Model by:
UE Default Manny, QBZ by brahian S.G
Brief
This is a personal project which was sparked after watching the GDC talk by David Helsby (Principal Animator, Riot Games) and Matt Boehm (Animator, Blizzard Entertainment), which motivated me to dive deep into FPS animation workflows. I’ve always loved FPS game animations in classics like Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike. Inspired by my favorite FPS games, I challenged myself to create a fully playable first-person view model animation entirely inside Unreal Engine.
Process
I built the FPS setup entirely inside Unreal Engine, starting with a gun rig and skeleton before wiring it into the character blueprint with sockets and control rig for the moving parts. I animated each action as its own montage and hooked them up to keyboard inputs, then replaced the default locomotion and idle animations with my own to make the whole thing playable.
Reference for the fps camera setup
Reference for the weapon choices and readability
The third-person character rig allowed me to animate on one side of the screen while previewing the FPS view in real time.
Gun Skeleton Setup
Complete rig with weight paint and added manual controls for parts that needed to attach/detach and move using UE Control Rig
Added a socket for the character’s hand to attach and animate the gun in the viewport.
In the character blueprint, I added a static mesh component, replaced it with the gun model, and parented it under the FPS mesh to ensure proper alignment and animation control
Reload Animation Behind the Camera
Created animation montages for each action and set them up directly in the character blueprint to trigger with keyboard inputs
created a default slot and replaced the existing idle animation in the locomotion state machine with my animations
(KEEP EXPLORING)
