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How to Solve Z order problem

Nilufer

Hello, we are trying to make an interactive deathblow animation between two characters like in Sekiro (we are beginners), and we created an animation like this. Of course, many things are still missing such as blood VFX, different camera angles, arm/hand details, and the animation is not fully finished yet, but I want to talk about a difficulty we experienced while making it.

We are creating 2 separate animations for 2 independent characters for a single deathblow animation. There is no problem there. Later, we can trigger them side by side inside the Godot game engine, but we run into Z-order issues.

While animating inside the Spine editor, is it possible to manage the Z-order interaction between two independent characters so they can properly overlap and interact with each other?

Also, do both characters absolutely need to be inside the same skeleton for this to work properly?

And since we are beginners, we would really appreciate any advice or workflow suggestions you may have. We take feedback seriously and are trying to improve as much as possible 🙂

Nate

While animating inside the Spine editor, is it possible to manage the Z-order interaction between two independent characters so they can properly overlap and interact with each other?

No, a skeleton is either above or below another skeleton in the editor (you can drag them).

Also, do both characters absolutely need to be inside the same skeleton for this to work properly?

That would solve it, but it may not be feasible. You don't really want the player and all enemies jammed into a single skeleton.

Some runtimes allow you to draw a skeleton with a start and end slot, so you can interleave skeletons. This is a manual process your app code controls. You could use events to let your app code know when/how such splitting should happen, but you'd have to build this yourself.

Another way to do it could be to use a slot as a marker. You'd then modify rendering and when it would normally draw the attachment for that slot, you instead draw another skeleton. Normally you'd do nothing, during an interactive deathblow you'd draw the other skeleton this way. Then you have some limited control over the draw order that is easy to control by moving the slot in the player skeleton's draw order.

Nilufer

Nate Thank you for the explanation, I think I understand it better now.

Since we are still beginners, I was thinking about a different workflow and I wanted to ask if it sounds reasonable.

Right now, both characters already have their own separate skeletons for normal gameplay. My idea was to keep those normal skeletons, but also create a second special skeleton setup used only for deathblow animations.

So during gameplay:

Player uses the normal player skeleton
Enemy uses the normal enemy skeleton

But when a deathblow starts:

We temporarily hide both normal skeletons
Then switch to a special combined deathblow skeleton/scene containing both characters together

That way we could fully control the draw order and interactions directly inside Spine without needing complicated runtime rendering tricks.

Do you think this is a reasonable approach for a beginner team, or would it become problematic later in production?

Nate

That can work, sure. The downsides are replicating both skeletons in a third skeleton. If your skeletons are configurable, you'll need to configure them to look the same in the combined skeleton. That might be a pain.

I doubt you need the full draw order interoperability that being within the same skeleton provides. You probably just need to split one of the skeletons (eg the enemy), eg so the player's sword and leg/foot goes on top of some parts (enemy back leg) and is behind others (eg to look like the sword goes through the stomach, while the kick is on top).

If that is right you could draw ~half of all enemies, then the player, then the other half of all enemies. Always do that to keep things simple (or do it just during deathblow). Splitting the enemy rendering carefully, I bet you could make all your deathblow animations will look right. It's a little tricky since you can't see the draw order in the editor.