Images get distorted when re-importing from Photoshop

Lluseya · 2 дек 2024

Hello! I set up a skeleton in Spine and created the image attachments by importing a Photoshop file. I made some changes to the images but did not change the size at all; I just changed the color of the line art. When I re-imported the .psd file and replaced the images, they got really distorted and I can't figure out why. However, if i import them without using the meshes that I previously made, they are fine.

This image shows the back of my character and how her hair is supposed to look. The slots at the top are the images without meshes and they show up correctly. This is just to provide a reference on how it's supposed to look.

In the next screenshot below, I have the attachment with the mesh selected. As you can see, the hair is now distorted, even though the mesh is correct and has the same size and shape as the correct image.

I have tried importing with "Trim whitespace" both ticked and unticked. I have also tried selecting and deselecting "deformed" in the edit mesh window. Since I did change the size for one of the other images, I got the prompt asking me to either stretch the images or keep them as is, and I opted to keep them as is. But for this particular image (the hair), the size didn't change at all, so I don't think that should affect it?

I spent a lot of time creating the meshes for some of these images and they are already being used in animations...so I'm trying to find a solution so that I don't have to redo them.

Thank you!

Misaki · 3 дек 2024

luseya Unfortunately, since all your screenshots show is the size of the current image, it is impossible to tell from those images alone whether the size of the current image is really the size of the image when the mesh was set. Perhaps there is a difference between the size of the image when the mesh was actually set and the size of the current image that is causing the situation.

One possible reason for the difference in image size is the padding settings. If you are using the PSD import feature of Spine 4.2, you can change the padding in the following section:

It may be easy to miss because the PSD file path is retained, but the Padding setting is reset to 1 when you reopen the Spine project, so this may be why the image size has changed. If you want to fix the padding to always use the same padding, you may want to use the [pad:number] tag.

If you remember actually changing the padding, re-importing the PSD with that padding is probably the quickest solution, but if the padding hasn't changed and you can't find the cause, you can uncheck Deformed in Edit Mesh mode and reposition the vertices. However, this may cause distortion, so it may be better to re-set the mesh if you want it to be clean and undistorted.

Lluseya · 3 дек 2024

Thank you for your reply, Misaki!
Unfortunately, padding is definitely not the issue, since I haven't touched it at all.
I wish I saved backups of the older images to confirm the sizing but I did not T__T But I literally just changed the color of the line art, so there is no reason that it should have been a different size...

I could reset the mesh, but since this is happening to all the images, it would just be really time-consuming, especially if I have to do it every time I update the images in the Photoshop for even slight changes.

Misaki · 3 дек 2024

luseya If all images are different sizes, it's probably because of scale, padding, or white space trimming, so it is probably best to look for what the original export settings were rather than redoing the mesh and weight settings. Are there any differences in the conditions? For example, you exported layers with PhotoshopToSpine for the first time but used Spine 4.2 PSD import for the second time.

Lluseya · 3 дек 2024

I did everything the same. I am still new to Spine, so I just went with default settings for everything, and I've only been using the Import PSD option. Below is a screenshot of the settings.

Let's suppose the size of the images did change slightly. There is some extreme distortion as you can see with the left leg, and the left arm is completely missing...so it doesn't seem right, even if the image size was slightly off.

So sorry I didn't save a backup of the old file for reference. I just didn't think the minor changes would cause such an issue T__T

Erika · 3 дек 2024

luseya Dear Luseya, when you overwrite the images on disk and they change size, but you uncheck Replace existing attachments, what happens is that the images change size on disk but not inside Spine. If this change is great, the distortion you see in your file can become very evident.

To prevent this from happening in the future always make sure that the images you want to change only on disk have exactly the same height and width of the previous versions.

To fix this error, I think the best route is to check Replace existing attachments and recreate the meshes.
If you don't want to redo every mesh, you can also only import a file with the images that are distorted, maybe by temporarily adding an [ignore] tag to the ones you don't want to replace or re-export.

For the future, consider working with a versioning system, or create a backup of your files before importing.