Troper Fencing Academy

A mixture of Teach Him Anger and Hit Me, Dammit!?

I think its called "Teaching"

& So that is what they teach but why do they do that?

Because it works, I guess? It's as valid an approach to teaching as the touchy-feely "everyone can do it if you try hard enough!" method.

But what it goes too well for the pupil?

edited 22nd Apr '14 1:48:45 PM by GAP

Personal experience GAP? My method of teaching would probably be tough and strict, to filter out the students who are not willing to commit.

Also, I think you a verb there.

edited 23rd Apr '14 12:34:00 PM by ElRigo

I think you mean conjunction.

I was referencing a meme. But yeah, conjunction.

Also

They made another video!

Complete with Throwing Your Sword Always Works

Rigo: we must all bow to the Blade Masters of Cold Steel. Clearly their swordsman ship is peerless.

ROFLMAO. Those guys swings are pretty sloppy. Only one guy seemed to have any control over his swings t all.

I was referred here from the Combat Thread over in Writer's Block.

This is perhaps a bit of a long shot, but it seems worth checking for possible resources:

Does anyone know of any resources describing the positions of the arm at the starts of various sword-swings, specifically in terms of the orientations of the parts of the arm relative to their "parent" part (wrist in terms of forearm, forearm in terms of upper arm, etc.), and ideally with reference to "slashing" weapons (I'm thinking of curved swords such as scimitars)?

I'm working on a game for which I want to have more freedom in movement of the sword-arm than canned animations seem likely to give. To that end I've been working on the problem myself for a few days; it occurs to me, however, that it's possible that someone has already done this at some stage, and made said information available somewhere.

The poster that referred me here suggested looking into Fechtbuchs, but I'm not sure that they'll have quite what I want: I'm less looking for the actual poses (although some of those might help) than a set of rules for defining relevant poses given a set of parameters. I'll probably not be attempting to implement all of the various interesting moves that a historical swordsman had available (pommel-strikes, for example), in part simply to keep the system somewhat manageable.

Well, you know what I say. In case of doubt, Katanas is always the answer.

Now, seriously, I think my buddies here have training manuals for sabers. I know, not the same thing, but since the sabre and the scimitar are related I would expect much of the movements to be the same, if anything the major difference I would expect is the scimitar footwork to be closer to the ground. You know, knees bent.

Also, I am sure there might be scimitar training videos in youtube, you could try that too.

As with the Fechtbuche, I'm not sure that that's what I'm looking for: I'm looking for mathematical relationships, and specific to the arms (and perhaps upper torso)—something like "when slashing from the left, the elbow is oriented such that it rotates along the line of the slash (thus making its axis of rotation perpendicular to said line)", etc.

(My mention of the scimitar is just an example, by the way; I haven't settled on a specific weapon. Indeed, the choice of "slashing" weapon is in part a result of the gameplay that I have in mind.)

For what it's worth, this needn't refer to terribly technical moves: I currently intend on sticking with simple slashes, at various arm elevations, directions, etc.—"left-to-right slash, roughly head-height", etc.

I think to get that you are going to need live motion actors and capture their motion on video. This exactly what those motion capture suits are for.

You could also find footage of bouts and reference the training manuals. Use height estimates to estimate proportions and you can figure out angles by mk 1 eyeball.

As to motion-capture, that's likely out of the question for me—at the moment, at least.

However, I have my own arm to go by—indeed, it served me reasonably well (well enough for this first attempt at the system, at least) for the parry poses (which I find can simply be interpolated to get the intermediate positions).

Well, short of any other references, I suppose that I'm back to working it out myself—which is fair enough, and more or less what I expected, I think.

For the sake of clarity, I'm ignoring the guides mentioned in part because I'm not simply aiming for a set of canned animations; I'm aiming to allow the user to perform slashes at arbitrary values within a set of parameters—roughly speaking, horizontal (or perhaps angled a little below) to vertical slashes.

For example, given a horizontal slash from left to right, the user might perform such an attack at arbitrary height from about head-height to about waist-height. Similarly, a slash aimed downwards and the to right might start high or low, and be performed from a range of angles from left to right.

In short, it doesn't seem to be quite as simple as creating a set of animations and interpolating them: there's a reasonable range of angles to cover from left-to-right horizontal through vertically-down and on to right-to-left horizontal, and they can all be performed at various heights, horizontal angles, etc.

This is why I'm not convinced that either the manuals or motion capture would be what I'm looking for: I want to compute poses for a given input, not pick from a static set of poses.

edited 2nd May '14 6:36:29 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

The guides are handy for references to posture and body position actually. They have start and finish postures. Using them doesn't imply canned they can be used to predict what movements are available according to posture, stance, and what part of the movement the actor is in.

You have a good start for finding out how you can get the rest of the info you need. You can use the info you gathered on your arm that you already have and gather other info like body size ratios. You can also use that general reference info applied to different body types when scaled in appropriate ratios.

Hmm... I see what you're saying, but I don't think that it's the postures that I'm lacking (well, I may go to them to look up some of the postures for right-to-left slashes—some of those feel somewhat awkward)—I'm honestly for the most part happy with the poses that I'm achieving with my own arm.

I was really just hoping that the difficult part—deriving the appropriate relationships between the various angles—had been done by someone before, which seems to not be the case.

The actual math info> Maybe but not in anything I can recall or have seen in this thread. The guides and manuals though could be a guide for you to estimate that info. Again you can use what info you have as a starting point. Also check youtube for videos of people doing the techniques. use a video editor to play the video back slowly to gather the info that way. You can infer angles, degrees of turn, and distance of movement with the video.

The video and guides are serving as the points of reference for you build the database you need to calculate that information as you need it.

I vaguely remember a couple of rapier manuals with geometric diagrams showing angles of the sword. Also, Sir William Hopes talked about angles in his New Method.

Though I think if you're looking for specific angles in terms of "how many degrees" between the limbs and the sword you might be out of luck: different people have different body types and that kind of detail is going to vary greatly. My way of holding my sword to cover myself will have different angles compared with someone much shorter than me, for example. Not to mention a different sword-type and style can differ in that too (eg: cross and basket hilt because of the hand protection- you don't want to push your sword out with a cross in the same way as a basket hilt or you get your hands hit. Some styles like to give point to opponents and some don't. That changes the angle between the sword and the sword arm.). That even changes when fighting against different opponents (for example, in Italian rapier when parrying you're supposed to point at above your opponents shoulder to fully close the line: the amount that you're going to raise your rapier is going to be different against opponents of different heights and thus the angel between your sword arm and your body is going to be different. Or that if you're doing Italian Bolognese you are supposed to point your sword at your opponent's throat: again opponents of different heights will affect the angle between your sword and your sword arm).

edited 2nd May '14 7:36:38 PM by IraTheSquire

I think that I have most of what you're describing, at least in a "raw", non-mathematical form. It's figuring out the relationships, the "rules" that predict a new sword pose that proves tricky.

Hmm, you do make a good point; if what I'm looking for did exist, it would likely be tied to a specific weapon and style, so I'd not just be looking for mathematics on sword-poses, but mathematics on sword poses for a specific weapon and specific style, which looks incredibly unlikely.

I might look up those resources that you mentioned however—thank you.

For what it's worth, I'm not aiming for authentic western martial arts movements, just something that works for my purpose and that "looks right" (in particular in keeping the arms in reasonable configurations, moving in plausible manners).

I think that I have my "parry" postures working acceptably—those I found that I could simply interpolate from a set of predefined poses. I'm having trouble with the attacking motions, which seem to be rather more varied.

(I've made a little progress, at least—for example, I've concluded that, when feasible, the elbow has its axis of rotation perpendicular to the direction of the slash (as projected onto a 2D plane in front of the wielder), allowing the elbow to bend in that direction, adding elbow rotation to the movement of the slash. There are, however, positions in which it's not feasible—slashes that come from the side on which the sword is held seem to be a prominent example.

This is, I feel that I should note, based on my own arm-flailings; it's a definition of my own "style", I suppose. While this may not be authentic, it's close enough for my current stage of development, I feel.)

edited 2nd May '14 7:58:13 PM by ArsThaumaturgis

Not just weapon and style. As I pointed that that the precise hand positions can also differ between different body types and between different opponents for the same person, even with the same weapon and style, simply because the exact position of where you put the blade will be different. For example, the amount of elevation of my sword is going to be different for opponents of different heights when I try to hit their head, simply because their heads are in different heights (and my position relative to my opponent will be different because of reach, but that's another thing).

I'm afraid you'll have to either get the numbers from every body type fighting every other body type that you can think of, or you'll have to use the exact same body type for every character if you want to use the same numbers. You're going have quite a tough task ahead.

edited 2nd May '14 8:49:23 PM by IraTheSquire

Some of that can, I think, be reduced by my specific situation:

There will likely be only a single player "body type", which will be more or less invisible (since the combat takes place from a first-person perspective). Meanwhile, changes in player attacks as a result of changing enemy types should come down to the player changing their input: if the enemy's head is lower, perform the relevant input at a lower point on the screen. That's more or less the point of what I'm doing: allowing the player to produce arbitrary attacks (within a set of parameters—it's far from entirely free-form) in a fairly intuitive manner.

As to the enemies, I may well end up giving in there and giving them canned animations for their attacks; since the player's "body" is constant, that should be fine. On the plus side, doing so makes it easier to give them little "tells" for their various attacks.

If your enemies are going to have different body types you're still going to need different sets of values for each one of them though. Otherwise when your main character is aiming for the head they would be hitting the neck if the enemy is taller, for example.

You'll need every single character to be exactly identical in body shape and sizes (exact arm length, leg length, torso length, etc).

Not really: the aiming comes from the player, and the player can see where the enemy's head is. Thus the player simply aims at the appropriate height. The player's control of their character's movements is rather more direct than in many games.

For comparison, look at the system used in Die by the Sword—what I have in mind is similar to that (and indeed, Die by the Sword was one of my inspirations, as I recall), albeit hopefully less unintuitive than the system that they had there.

edited 3rd May '14 8:12:26 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

I remember die by the sword. Sadly the controls were fairly clumsy and control was at best difficult to master.