Animated axe asset - setup and animation

The basic parts of the object are the Shaft, lower and upper handle, lower blade and upper blade.

The animated parts are the upper handle, lower blade and upper blade. The other parts do not move.

As you can see from the outliner and screen shot, the bones are parented inside the object, relating tho the part that will be affected.

I have purposefully placed a bone in each handle to aid location on the character when in game implementation comes.

Based on the plan I already laid out, I animated the asset with key frames at each mode.

This gave quite a linear movement, but was a decent guide.

I added some space in the animation between each mode using the graph editor so that I could add a sort of 'locking' animation into the movement.

This is how the Graph editor looks:

And here is the final animation: