Animation help

[Slimwaffle]

Does anyone have any experience animating with blender? I have a gun and fps hands model each made separate. I want to create a animation that combines the two. So far I have them combined fine and able to assign original textures inside leadwerks to each part. 

The problem is that my gun model has loose parts each with its own armature. I tried making an animation in blender that moves the trigger, hammer and the fingers. When I added the animation model to leadwerks it gave me 4 separate animations. Is there a way to combine these animations? I just used a basic one that uses bone rotation and key-framing.

[randomdude]

All bones need to be connected, you only assign the meshes to the related bones. The hand or finger is a different mesh with its own bones and animation. you can make them together but than you can not switch the weapon. try this tutorial.

 

[Slimwaffle]

This was very similar to the first method I tried.

What I figured out is that no matter what you do each armature is treated as a separate animation.

I wanted to keep the gun and hands in their original forms when combining them to be able to separate the textures over two objects (so I could keep the original textures).

What I decided to do in the end was keep the bones for the hands (to allow posing) and remove all the bones from the gun. Then when I did the animations I was able to pose the hands and move them. Then add all the separate parts of the gun and movements using object mode movement and rotations. I still ended up with the same result and was able to do everything as a single animation because there is only one armature.