Damocles, The model was made in 3dsmax and "vectorized" with the Swift 3d plugin.

The animations are hand made, I never use mocap.

Actually it wasn't so hard to make the animations look good, since they can be seen only from the side i didn't had to worry about making them look good from other angles , and also, since the model it's all black, some parts that doesn't deform well aren't noticeable.

This is the 3d model of the samurai.




and look how bad it looks from another angle and with another color, the geometry errors are much more noticeable and the hand isn't even holding the sword