Question about the animation blending mechanism

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I am trying to make some new animations and I would like to understand more about the animation blending mechanism in MB Warband.

What I already know:
  1. The final animation in the game could be the result of two animation combined. For example, when we attack while walking/run, the upper body is using attack animation while lower body is the walk/run animation.
  2. The root bone of the character is [abdomen], one of its child [spine] is the start bone for all upper body animation; two of its other children [thigh.L] and [thigh.R], are the start bones for all lower body animation.
  3. Any attack animation or walk/run animation has both position/rotation values changed with time on the root bone [abdomen].
  4. When we are in the attack-hold pose (press and hold mouse key but not release it), the upper body always faces the same direction, no matter we are walking/running to any direction (e.g. only lower body rotates without changing the attack direction). Also, there is up-and-down animation for the whole body when walking/running.
My question:
How is this mechanism realized in the game?

I have some basic animation knowledge so I tried multiple things in Blender, but could not replay the same.
For example, I tried:
  • (A) Blend 0.5 on [abdomen] bone for both attack and running animations, then make sure upper body started from [spine] only has attack animation, while lower body started from [thigh.L/R] only has running animation. This will not give the point (4) result mentioned above, because the attack direction would be different depending on whether you are running or just stand still ([abdomen] position/rotation are affected by running animation too).
  • (B) Make sure attack animation only affects starting bone from [spine], so running animation fully control the [abdomen] root bone. This has similar problem mentioned in point (A), the attack direction would be different for stand still or running.
  • (C) Make sure attack animation fully control the [abdomen] bone, and running animation only affects [thigh.L/R] bones. This one can make sure the attack direction always face the same. But the problem is the whole body will not have the up-and-down bumping feeling when running (which makes me believe the running animation should control the [abdomen], but how could the upper body attack animation not impacted from this?)
More complicate question would be, how the rotation is realized? When we are in the attack-hold pose, we can running for different direction without changing the upper body pose. Does it simply rotate [abdomen], then somehow reversely rotate the [spine] to match previous result? I find it's hard to reproduce the same result in Blender.

Anyway, it could be super useful since my animation might modify the [abdomen] bone too, so I want to understand the mechanism better. Hope someone with more experience could explain.

Thanks!
 
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