Weapon (component) driven animation methods.

I'm positive the answer(s) to this is all over this forum and youtube, and many other places, but I don't know what to look for. I do this stuff as a hobby off and on, so I'm still pretty new to it.

I'm curious if there are any interesting ways to implement weapon specific animations. For example, a shortsword vs. a great hammer in Salt and Sanctuary. I'm specifically interested in 2D, but it seems like a thing that would be similar in 2D and 3D.

Obviously, skeletons could be animated for every possible combination of, say, weapon and shield, but I wonder if there is a way to have the weapon/shield drive the animation and have the player/enemy model "follow" that.

Am I crazy?

 

The Weapons example of Animancer (link in my signature) demonstrates how you can easily set up a component attached to your weapons which defines the animations a character will use when that weapon is equipped.

 

That'd be an IK-based solution, but I don't think it'd look very good. Honestly it'd probably look more like a Landfall game than what you're going for.
It might be possible to make it look good, but that's probably going to take a lot more work than to just animate the things from scratch.

There is smart things you can do with masking - say you want the spear and sword to have different attacks, but want the shield arm to do the same thing in both instances. Then you could play a generic attack animation on the whole body, and use a mask to get the correct thing on the arm. Note that:
- it won't look as good as bespoke full-body animations.
- it won't save you that much work if the animator's decent, as your animator could use the previous animation as a starting point to make the new one, saving time that way.
- It requires skeletal animation, which is mostly a 3D thing. There is skeletal animation available for 2D - but I kinda think that all just ends up looking like Helheim Hassle.

 

Thank you both. IK is what I needed to know to search for, so that alone has helped a lot. The Animancer example is a far more advanced version of another idea I had, but for what I'm playing with now, I'm actually going for a "weapon controls the player" feel where the player will be almost a ragdoll being dragged around by the weapons. Again, just a hobby.