Hey guys, been loving working in Spine and while it's one of the best art tools I've worked with in terms of how laser focused and clearly made WITH artists in mind it is, there are a few things I'd still love to see. Below is a list of a couple of ideas I have. Please let me know what you think!
Folders/Groups in the Animation Timeline:
I would love a way to organize groups of keyed bones/meshes/etc in my animations. When things start getting complex it becomes difficult to make minor edits to things such as timings of small elements that have multiple bones. This currently means manually selecting the set of bones you need to edit before editing on the timeline. As a result I find myself making a ton of default isolated animations and then copy pasting them over to the more robust animation sets. This is an okay solution but sucks for iterative purposes. It would be much more convenient if we had a way to organize groups of keys (or rather groups of bones/meshes) in the timeline for easier selection and easier viewing.
Default Curve Options:
I've found that when keying animations w/ curves on (rather than linear or stepped) you get auto interpreted curves between each key. It would be great to have an option to turn this off and instead make all keys default to a single curve type (either one defined by us, or the actual default setting you get when double clicking curves).
Bone Naming Conventions:
When creating bones that are children of other bones we currently have them inherit the color of the bone. However, they are always named bone#, regardless of what they're inheriting from. I would prefer to have an option to have them be named whatever the parent bone is + a number. For instance, the root bone Hair would create children Hair1 Hair2 Hair3 etc down the line (which would mean ignoring the #s, so assuming Hair2 is the child of Hair1, it wouldn't actually be named Hair11 (hair1child1 essentially)). I may be phrasing this in an incredibly convoluted way, and I see why at its core this seems like a meaningless request (since most animations would just have like, leftArmTop -> leftArmBottom -> Hand) but for more complex forms like tails, or anything that would ultimately employ a path, I think this would be helpful in shaving some time off of renaming bones. I think basically that most people need to rename the bones ANYWAYS, so it may be helpful to at least know what the bone's parent was to make it easier to find in case you for some reason don't.
PS JSON Exporter: Allow for the Folder export option w/ Skins to be used WITHOUT Skins:
From an organizational standpoint I'd love to be able to keep different pieces of the art organized in folders in my explorer. As it stands the only way to do this is by using those folders as Skins. However, there are times I'd like to be able to separate things out in folders without using any Skins. Would love to see an option to export with these folders without having to then manually remove every slot from the skins afterwards.
Masks (Admittedly a Pipe Dream):
I know this is a bit of a none starter, but I'd still love to see it. This is easy enough to achieve currently within Unity by using the separator as it currently is, but animating around this is obviously very messy since no masks exist currently in Spine. I doubt this is the case, but if it would somehow be easier to just emulate masks (ie: not having to export with them - similar to how we don't actually export things like Blending styles) that would actually work incredibly well since the exported file can easily then be masked in Unity just using 2 fairly simple shaders.
Thanks for taking the time to read this if you got this far! Feel free to critique or add to any of these if you see problems with my thoughts on these. Thanks again to everyone at Esoteric for such a good program to begin with (and also for how quick and helpful you've been at responding to every bug report I've filed in the past) and also to anyone who's read this!
Cheers!