How do I "equip" this weapon properly to a model? (IMG)

I have a custom model, and a custom weapon. The designer doesn’t know the answer, so I’m asking the world, how do I “equip” this weapon to the model?

In my head I think it should be a simple process of attaching the weapon model to the hand of the character model, but that doesn’t work unless I adjust the rotation etc.

What’s the common way of setting all this up, making it re-usable in other models etc? ( like other player or enemies)

Thanks!

You just attach the object to whatever bone most closely matches the attachment point. If need be you add a bone in the hierarchy to get the proper placement.

Generally the matrix transform tree handles the rest. Per your example, a mace attached to the wrist bone will move when any bone higher in the tree moves. Attach it to a “weapon” bone you make for this purpose and you can do some additional work to it, such as making it sway around a bit instead of appearing to be glued to the hand.

To make it portable to other weapons and characters you need to design a “weapon socket” concept where each model will have a similarly named bone and programmatically attach the weapons at run time.