I based a lot of the movements off this reference, hard to fully recreate, but its also what the game producer was looking for in the dagger movements/motions but I'll definitely be looking more into your suggestion as that's been something I've been looking at also for quite some time :)
I use a 3d program called Maya to build, animate, and render images in, then I take all the rendered images and convert them to GIF format using photoshop but you can use almost anything else to do that.
