First Person Looking At Hands
Typically, first-person falls into two categories: first-person singular, where the story is told from one individual point of view; and first-person plural, where the narration comes from a group. First-person singular uses variations on ‘I’ and ‘me’ to include the narrator in the story, whereas first-person plural uses ‘us’ and ‘we’ to impart opinion and decisions. Ken Black's explanation of first, second and third person is woolly and not to the point. It's a mish-mosh of something vaguely resembling grammar and narrative technique. To put it briefly and precisely: The first person refers to the person speaking. The second person refers to the person spoken to.
I am wondering how developers are able to create games where the player can actually see the characters hands as they are casting spells, shooting, etc. A good example of this would be Overwatch. How is this done? Is there two separate views? One that the enemy sees, and then another that the player sees where its just arms and one is hidden to the other player? Or is the camera positioned in such a way where it is actually just the character model. Thanks!
Man Looking At Hands
1 Answer
'depends', basically. But the most common way (e.g. what most FPS games do) is having a detailed model for the player (your local avatar) with properly placed camera(s - see later) so you can see your hands/feet/etc and everyone remote to you is rendered 'as is' (the model and it's locomotion / animations for jumping, etc - including how the model holds e.g. a rifle while jumping, etc).
The tricky part comes when
a) your game wants to be unique/complex on this e.g. like in your example: you want to see hands while you 'cast a spell' (or blood spilling in the eyes or anything)
and/or
b) you realize it's annoying to see particular body parts (e.g. your feet, as it might block view and/or makes jumping look silly), or gun sinks into walls/doors or such
In both cases, using multiple cameras for so called 'layering' is the solution. Long story short: there's a camera that see the rifle in (kinda) topmost Z-Order, or a camera that cannot see the character model or a camera that can see 'floating hands' casting spells.
The trick with these, nothing else but that particular camera can see the effects, i.e. only the player (everyone else, as I mentioned above, see the model doing the 'standard something' associated with that particular action. E.g. casting any spell > waving hands above the head or such).
I hope this helps to give you an idea how it works. Cheers!