Better rifle animations

One thing that has always driven me batty about this game is the horrible fire-from-the-hip rifle animation. Fallout did it too, and it was equally bad.

By taking the gun from the gun animation and combining it with the person from the bow animation, you can get a pretty good result. See attached picture for an example.

My question: Do I have the steps right to get these into the game?

1. Export to bmp from Artview.
2. Use image editor (I like Paint.NET) to produce the new image
3. Save the new image with the same name as the old rifle image being replaced
4. Repeat for 8 directions and 4 pallettes, 32 total images
5. Use Artview to build an ART file from the bmps
6. Make sure ART filename is the same as the old rifle ART file
7. Play Arcanum

Any shortcuts or better tools that would simplify things?

I'm only going to do it for male humans wearing the Tarant guard type outfits, so it doesn't become an impossible task.

Thanks.

 

The "easiest" way how to make such modification will be probably re-rendering the whole animation, which means that you also have to remodel npc and rifle model, rig it, and then create animation. Then it's easy to render and export it by one mouse click (using script).

It might seems to be harder, depends on your modelling skills, but its definitely worth doing, since when you have the models and animations finished, you can then easily render any other npc and make modifications to them.

Converting rendered images to .art file is easy thing with ArtGen -> http://arcanum.game-alive.com/forums/vi ... ?f=11&t=51

Here is link to my automaton prototype that I put into the game -> http://arcanum.game-alive.com/forums/vi ... ?f=23&t=43

Hope it helps and motivates you.
Cheers.