Modifying existing animations?

I haven't seen many people with good animations, but who doesn't have them?

And again, it's very difficult, almost impossible, to create complex animations using only one skeleton that was exported from Heroes 5. You can only normally create something on the level of "moving the model a couple of meters" without any headaches. (I'm talking about the movement animation for the ballista from Footman, by the way, it's a cool idea.)

But in general, when an animator creates an animation, they have various control elements attached to the skeleton that allow them to do their job properly.
This entire structure (the model with skinning on the skeleton and control elements for animation) is called a "rig" in the industry, and there are often separate people who create such a structure. By the way, it's a very in-demand profession in game development.
In short, to create normal animations, you first need to set up this "rig." Elu has already started doing this by adding an inverse kinematic to the skeleton. If someone properly sets up the skeleton and control elements during the process, it would be helpful to share this with the Community.

But, given our level of knowledge, it would be optimal to find a way to export normal animations from Heroes 5 and edit them (especially since such a method definitely exists). You can go wild here without any special skills. You can simply slightly modify the animation, create an animation from different pieces, often you can reassign the animation of one creature to another, or create an animation from pieces of different creatures. For example, I created an animation for a plate armor unit with an orcish flail (by reassigning the animation from orcs) and an animation for a foot pikeman (by taking the leg animation from Nicholas and the torso animation from an Empire rider). Then I deleted all the animations because I didn't figure out how to import them into the game.