Introduction
When posing characters to aim firearms, It often ends up being misaligned, because the artist has to visually align everything without any assistance. My solution for this is “Aiming Helper”, a Blender add-on made to help align sights with character eyes.
The Problem
Posing firearms for characters is often done manually with visual alignment, which is not very precise due to the nature of how the artist moves the weapon in 3D space. This does not always equal a good result, because real aiming follows rules, most importantly, the sights being aligned with the eyes.
What It Does
It allows the user to assign visual points to meshes in the 3D space, which then make up a line, showing alignment both in degrees and with color.
How It Works
In this case, Im effectively running a modal listening for mouse events to get mouse coordinates, when the user starts to selects a point, I get the mesh by raycasting onto it from the mouse coordinates, then I get the mesh coordinates from the raycast coordinates, so I can always have the point on the mesh, then I visualize all of it using the gpu module.
What I learned
I became more familiar with blf and gpu modules and how they work. This is very useful as many quality add-ons use them and Im also happy for the add-on to have been published and approved on the Blender Extensions platform.
Links
Blender: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/aiming-helper/