I'm a programmer that aspires to become better at drawing in 2d. I love the look of hand-drawn animations, but the reality of drawing them is a bit more time-consuming than I expected, and it seems that I'll be spending much more time drawing than coding, when I'd like to have a good balance of both.
Does anyone here successfully mix hand-drawn animations with puppet animation? Is this feasible to do in the Spine work flow?
Frame by frame is easily doable in Spine, if you have the management correct with the Slots and Image Attachments. Images can share the same Slot (e.g. a slot named "Left Hand" containing images of the left hand in different poses). You can then key the visibility of the Attachments in Animate Mode.
Do note, however, that you cannot keyframe the visibility of more than one Attachment in a single Slot.
You can achieve nice result with very few additional poses to draw.
spine offers not only skeletal animation but also mesh deformation. which means you can draw 2 key poses of your character and make a nice transition using mesh deform.
as here I have demonstrated. 2 images are interpolated using mesh deform and alpha overlapping.
I have also made a video explaining that transition
