Counter-Strike is the only game I can think of that made an effort to support holding weapons left handed; they went for the simplest solution and simply mirrored the right-handed models. This requires almost zero effort but means everything on the guns is flipped; anything that is really located on the right side of the gun will be on the left side of the gun when it is mirrored, and vice-versa. Your average person won't notice or care, but gun enthusiasts can be annoyed by such details. In Unity, you can mirror a model horizontally by simply setting the scale on the X-axis to -1.

There are several potential ways you can handle this, depending on the content of your game:

• If you have fictional guns (e.g. in a sci-fi setting), you could simply design ambidextrous weapons that look about the same on both sides, so it's not obvious if the weapon is mirrored. Some real-world weapons still fit this idea; for example, the FN P90 looks pretty much the same on both sides.

• Another potential open, if the animations don't involve interacting with something on one side of the weapon/item, is to mirror the arms but not the item. For example, with your typical semi-automatic pistol, all of the animations would look fine if you mirrored the arms on the X-axis but didn't mirror the pistol (if the pistol is a child of the arms, you can set its X-axis scale to -1 to un-mirror it).

With clever use of mirroring, you might not need separate copies of your animations for left-handed and right-handed use.

Counter-Strike is the only game I can think of that made an effort to support holding weapons left handed; they went for the simplest solution and simply mirrored the right-handed models. This requires almost zero effort but means everything on the guns is flipped; anything that is really located on the right side of the gun will be on the left side of the gun when it is mirrored, and vice-versa. Your average person won't notice or care, but gun enthusiasts can be annoyed by such details. In Unity, you can mirror a model horizontally by simply setting the scale on the X-axis to -1.

There are several potential ways you can use mirroring, depending on the content of your game:

• If you have fictional guns (e.g. in a sci-fi setting), you could simply design ambidextrous weapons that look about the same on both sides, so it's not obvious if the weapon is mirrored. Some real-world weapons still fit this idea; for example, the FN P90 looks pretty much the same on both sides.

• Another potential option, if the animations don't involve interacting with something on one side of the weapon/item, is to mirror the arms but not the item. For example, with your typical semi-automatic pistol, all of the animations would look fine if you mirrored the arms on the X-axis but didn't mirror the pistol (if the pistol is a child of the arms, you can set its X-axis scale to -1 to un-mirror it).

With clever use of mirroring, you might not need separate copies of your animations for left-handed and right-handed use.