The pipeline here is a little complicated. The characters are spine-based. Lip/facial movements are done in a custom tool I wrote that uses HTML5/webgl runtime. Body movements are Spine authored, putting 3.7 audio feature to good use. Then all the parts are composited in AfterEffects.

Yeah, I “risked” the 3.7 beta status to get audio events, which IMO is a feature that really unlocks full scene animation in Spine. (I say “risked” because I usually avoid betas. 3.7.x has been quite stable.)

I’ll look for the export cropping/settings you mentioned. A camera on the dope sheet would be cool. I can imagine my work flow changing on my project to composite the scenes in Spine instead of After Effects.

Scene comp in AE

• The huge effects library that can be applied to layers
• pre-comping (useful for organizing, grouping, reusing animations)
• camera movement (in my case accomplished with precomping)

Scene comp in Spine

• skip export/import steps for Spine to AE
• better previewing performance
• scrubbable audio (have to hit play in AE)
• scene can be played In-game with sprite assets, smaller in size, maybe interactive