This is a special gun, so it required some special care. The M1 Garand is one of the most iconic weapons of the second world war, and it has it's caviats. So I decided to give it some variations in the reload animations.
What I'm trying to showcase in this video is that I made 4 different variations of the reload, all showing different ways of pulling back the bolt handle as well as inserting the en bloc clips. Also giving it variation in if the bolt stays open or closes automatically (including the infamous Garand Thumb) and randomize which reload it will play, as well as branching to any other second half. So from 4 reload animations I get 16 variations of reloads, 12 tactical reloads and 4 empty ones.
It was super fun to animate this and trying to get it as accurate as possible. Unfortunately we had some time constraints in animating the grenade attachment reload faithfully, so that is a known shippable aspect for gameplay purposes.
Also, animating the Garand Thumb was hella fun!
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5LB-Viw6eGY/maxresdefault.jpg)