Skinning is ready!

April 24th, 2014

Skinning is now available in Spine! You can now bind multiple bones to a mesh and control how much each bone influences each mesh vertex. When the bones move, they affect the vertices and deform your mesh. Adjusting bones is much easier than adjusting each vertex individually, which speeds up animating. Also, using code at runtime to adjust individual vertices is hard, but with skinnnig your code can just adjust bones to achieve great mesh deformations.

To use skinning, choose the Weights tool and select a mesh. Click Bind and choose 2 or more bones to affect the mesh vertices. Finally, select a bone and one or more vertices then drag up/down to adjust the weights. Now rotate, scale or translate your bones to see how the mesh deforms.

Here's a quick example showing the spear deforming using skinning:

Skinning is fully functional, but we still have work to do. Soon we will be adding automatic weight computation which gives you reasonable weights to start with, greatly reducing the effort needed to setup skinning. We'll also add weight smoothing which makes it easier to get a nice transition when there are many vertices.

As promised, now that skinning is in the editor, we have shifted to bringing the runtimes up to speed with the new features: meshes, FFD and skinning. We've already finished spine-csharp and spine-xna and you can expect more runtimes to be done soon.

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