References for Spear Animations (Suggestion)

Around 20th of April I should have lots and lots of reference videos recorded. One of my friends is a student at film making school and will record training at my brotherhood. This includes something not many people can get - he's going to borrow us a GoPro, meaning we'll have believable first person references.

Dragomir - that sounds awesome. Well if anything doesn't go according to the plan, i also have a bit of experience  recording stuff (montage, motion tracking too - not sure if this will be of any help though - i don't really know much about animation so i have no idea if tracking some of the points from video footage would be helpful for animators in any way - maybe it's something worth asking), i probably could borrow GoPro and a camera good enough to record some nice (well, as long as 1920x1080 with 25-30 fps will suffice) footage too. I'm pretty sure you won't need my help but it's good to know there's a plan B - that's why I'm letting you know.

Cool! Backup is always useful.

I'm practicing historical fighting for 5 years, I know how to hold a spear :P Worth noting that we do full contact group sport fights, meaning that we don't aim to "look good", but to actually "kill" our opponent (by simply hitting him). That means our fighting styles are perfectly practical, with stances and all.

Alright, I recorded some references for animators. I don't know if the footage is complete, the recordings from GoPro are missing, so we might get those later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjfYlM2_I4M

Note that it's not 9000% realism, not the way people would actually fight (e.g. I didn't aim for the face :P), but it's kept viable. I looked at how Skyrim animations work, and recorded accordingly.

The idea I had was for the weapon not to be sheathed on the back or anything, but instead, the character would rise it and use it as a walking stick. If that can be implemented it wouldn't only improve realism, but it would give some awesome athmosphere to all kinds of guards walking around towns.

I also recorded a turning animation. To prevent clipping with in-game objects our character would just rise the spear up on turning and lower it back to the offensive position when stopped turning.

The attacks I also suited for Skyrim mechanics. Most of them are legit and just like they should look, only the side ones I didn't have much idea for, so they look a bit wonky.

I love the way it is held when "sheathed" so to speak. Just what I had hoped to see ;)

combat would certainly be interesting with this implemented, like longer ranged melee attacks, for the actual purpose people use spears

Hm, maybe the power attacks to the right and left could be swinging them around? It would work very well for the halberds. Unless halberds will be a different animation style, of course.

Halberds would be swung more from above to down, but sideways hits would work too, not so much for the spears though. In theory a spear swing can deal some damage, you're basically slashing a knife on a 2 meters arm, but it's very inaccurate. For halberds I think it would be best to have similar animations as for spears, just replace the power attacks with swings, could be swings extracted from two handed axe. The normal attack would probably best stay as thrust in that case.