A little informal update: we've been doing an internal beta and it's looking good. We hope to have the 4.2-beta available in a week or two.
Below is a smattering of examples, done quickly and a little roughly, but they show some of what is possible.
First here is the old alien animation:
Here it is with physics on the head:
It works really well for any hanging parts or accessories, like Spineboy's hair. Here all of Spineboy's hair keys have been deleted and physics constraints added. Note how the hair is dynamic and responds similarly to how it was keyed (but without all that work!). It also responds across animations changes and there is now dynamic hair movement during the aim animation:
Here the platform from our Wave Principle - Animating with Spine #4 video, but without keys on the platform tail:
Here's a chain of bones that behaves similar to a whip when rotated. The bones near the end are also scaled using physics. There are tons of interesting effects that can be squeezed out of the physics! This one could maybe be used for flames in a fire. All of this movement comes from just rotating the one bone.
Here's a quick test on the mix-and-match hair, physics giving some rotation and some translation lag:
It's not limited to just accessories, it can be used on major character features, like the raptor's tail. Here is the raptor with all the tail and gun keys deleted for walk, jump, and roar. 317 keys were deleted! The tail is straight and the gun doesn't move.
It took 12 mouse clicks to setup physics on the tail and gun, giving this:
More time could be spent refining the physics settings, but this is already great. The amount of time physics saves animating things is huge AND the results are better and react dynamically. Plus since your animations have hundreds fewer keys, the data files are smaller.
Anyway, back to work we go to get it finished up. It won't be too long now!
