Hi, what is the best way to approach a visible hand+gun to show the player that they are holding a weapon without making the entire model invisible and just adding a hand+gun model?

See the below image for an example (source: digitaltrends.com):


I know that if the game is only first person and the player will not be visible that a simple solution is just to add a hand+gun model; however, how can I accommodate for the player being visible by others and in 3rd person?

Thanks,
82RJZAE

you can attach the world-model to a bone on your model
this model will be visible for all but the player
the player gets a view entity (easy-to-implement, bad light effects) or a normal entity which is attached to the camera (position+angle, more work, but nicer results because model reacts on lights)
you have to differ between player and others
if you want to switch between a fps and a tps you need to switch the visibility of the first person weapon and add a world-model also for the player

That's a great idea! Thanks MasterQ32!

in my opinion it looks great if you add the mtl_specBump shader to the model
so you get really nice looking weapons which react in a great way to dynamic lights

I'll bet! Any idea how to make the model visible only to the player and not to anyone else?

just create it only for the player as a local entity