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Today while I was doing many bug reports throughout the goblin camp, I discovered something I had missed!

All thanks to miss Roah Moonglow for quickly whipping out a shield and javelin combo to try and stab me with while Astarion was being ham-fisted in her pockets.

As it turns out (news to me), we have got a spear-and-shield type pose, but it only shows up with javelins, since spears don't have the versatile property. Let's have a look!




So, from the left we have the ready pose for javelin and shield, the recovery pose for javelin and shield, then the ready and recovery poses for one-handed javelin alone. On human-sized models these mostly look okay, and they're our baseline. Male and female models use more or less the same pose and animation data here, with slight differences meaning that the males have more solid stances, while females have a softer ones. There is only one place where they actually use tangible different pose data, and that's in the one-handed recovery pose, where the male and female models have deliberately different free hand positions. Aside form that, though, I'd say this looks like they're using all the same data for the other three stances, with the differences coming about from differences in the models.

So, let's see how halflings fare (Apologies for the odd drop off in image quality on the halflings. I'm not sure what caused it, other than the visual effect that was happening to Dia):




These are just the shield poses, because the first issue that pops up is immediately apparent. When you adopt the ready pose for halflings using shield and javelin, they initially drop into the pose depicted in the first image - it's their dual-wielding pose ,and clearly not appropriate. This is obviously a bug, so I won't criticise it further than that. After hitting that pose for a brief moment, they then slide into the pose depicted in the second image, which is anew one, and is clearly designed for this weapon set up. the pose itself isn't bad, though it does suffer from that same hyper-dynamism of the foot positioning (that leading food needs to come in behind the shield, unless they want to get it chopped off). The main issues are the leg tearing around the groin area, on both models, and the fact that the shield and weapons clip with the pose, and with each other, on both models. With the recovery pose (third image), aside from the over-extended front foot again, the pose is actually fine here, although a straight or upward tile to the weapon would make more sense on small-sized characters.

Unfortunately, between those ready poses and the recovery poses... is the attack animation, and for the first time in these discussions I really have to make note of problems in the attack animation itself.




The limb extension is not a problem here - it's a fast action and it's meant to be a reach anyway. The issue, more pointedly, is the terrible clipping with the gear and the models that is very visible even in the fast attack animation.

Finally, the one-handed poses:




As with the javelin and shield poses, we have a pose slip here. Upon entering the ready pose for one-handed javelin, both male and female halflings adopt the first pose shown; it looks pretty good as far as poses go, and is quite satisfactory, except for the way that the weapon itself clips with one hand on males and both hands on females. We only see this pose for a faction of a second, however, before they slide into the pose in the second image - recognisable as their "throw" ready pose. This is also clearly a bug.

Without the shield in the way, the attack animations work well enough, however, the models draw back and end their attack animation in the pose show by the third images; this would be fine, except that they flick to the fourth image, which is their recovery pose, as soon as they finish drawing back, and it causes a jitter in the arm and spear because the end of the animation and the recovery pose that it moves into do not mesh or align properly at all. There's nothing inherently wrong with not having the end of the attack animation align with the recovery pose, however, in this case it really needs to be smoothed properly so that the arm and spear don't jerk and flip around. I'm not going to be too harsh on the clipping through the hand of the javelin in the draw back because it's the end of an animation, transitioning to something else, but getting it anchored properly would be good. Unlike human-sized models, there is no tangible difference between the recovery poses of male and female halflings here, but that's not really an issue; I just don't know if it's the intention or not.

I wonder how many other animation sets I've missed? I know of a couple I'm missing for not having the weapons to hand yet (hand crossbows), but if I find others along the way I'll try to cover them too ^.^