Hello there! We at Abbey Games (Reus for PC, PS4 and XBone, Renowned Explorers for PC) are diving into your crafty software to create our next game! We already have some experience using skeletal animation tools, as you can see in Reus and we're looking to get a big advantage in our 2D animations by using Spine! So far we've been impressed by some features and a bit puzzledby others. We hope you can help us in making some magic happen!
To give a bit of context, our new project uses a lot of 2D characters on the screen, with customizable parts like hair, weapons, maybe even armor etc. Some are way more elaborate. Those special characters will have animations that suggests movement in all directions. A bit comparable with Renowned Explorers, as you can see a few times in this video
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I hope that helps with getting an idea what we would like to achieve. 🙂
I would like to dive into the issues we have directly.
So the first and foremost thing we're missing is the ability to work with multiple skins at the same time. All custom parts are on separate skins. So all different coups, all weaponsets, all physical builds and facial features are in different skins. Our engine has that feature built in, so we can preview animations there. However, getting our hair and eyes on exactly the right place during setup is a bit of a pain. I've seen that you're working on supporting this, I just liked to add my +1 to that. 😉 Right now we work around it by duplicating slots that are attachment heavy (like a head or hand), call it "sketchy_x", make it yellow and turn of export. It works ok for set-up, but pollutes the hierarchy structure.
Second, we use a lot of twists and turns in the animation, and go pretty wild with switching parts or messing around with the IK. That means we often want to set Keyframes on the whole skeleton for example in the beginning of an animation, so that when we add something extra in the set-up, it doesn't mess too much with the skeleton if possible. If I'm correct, you can keyframe a lot of the properties of a skeleton with ctrl+L, except for visibility of skinplaceholders. (Correct me if I'm wrong). E.g. we twist our warrior around, going from a stretching pose from the front, to a releasing pose showing his back and changing the IK and sprites. We found the best way to do this is by making two sets of arms and keeping one invisible at start and the other visible at start. While we've been using ctrl+L to key the frames, it didn't look like the visibility of the slots was keyed, as some parts seemed to appear and disappear again.
Maybe we just stumbled around a bit and Ctrl+L also keys visibility, but in case not, we're looking for it!
One feature that would help as well is being able to "hide all children" in the hierarchy explorer. right now you have to manually hide/show all children of a bone or slot. For editing purposes, it would be nice to alt+click the show/hide button and make it hide/show the bone and all its children.
Dockable windows for for example images, slots, or IK's would be nice too. We find ourselves scrolling from images to bones quite a bit, since using the P shortcut doesn't place images in skinplaceholders, and we only use that.
But the feature we would really love to see the most is having a way to change the playback speed in the animation! Especially since tweening can have some unforeseen effects, it would be nice to see how things are going wrong.
A bonus would be a way to setup a skeleton while animating. That way we can mess around with the bones in a certain pose, smack some new textures on them, and adjust the textures to the bones using that pose. Right now, you have to go to setup, put the character in that pose, do the above....and put everything back since all animations are relative to the setup. 😉 Our work around is to just have multiple limbs of things that change a lot, like the multiple arms, and just hide the arms you're not using.
I hope you can help us, and any tips are welcome!