Hi!
Here's a short video to spark your imagination on how to use Spine. VIDEO
Comments about the graphics at the end.
Tech part:
It runs completely as a native Qt/Qml item, so there is no runtime involved. The Spine Json export is converted and that gets to the Spine limits part. Earlier version of the converter can be found in my post to runtimes section.
I admit, that I haven't checked too closely on how the Spine runtime is used inside eg. Unity, but I guess what I did here is something different. Some of the animations eg. the breathing and head sway are defined as "states" ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 and are procedurally controlled from Qml with a random elements. So the length, curve and direction is handled procedurally. The blink is complete animation, but is started with random intervals.
My vision is to use Spine for larger scene animation with multiple skeletons, so I made a new camera element. You can see it in this image:
The subtle sway of the image is to imitate a hand held camera and is controlled from Qml. I can already add multiple simultaneous animation to bones by injecting new bones between the defined structure and animating them separately. The sway is done just like that with the camera bone.
What's next. Currently the meshes support only one deformation animation at the time, but I want to have the smile and the blink at the same time, so there is some work to be done.
Graphics:
The graphics are rendered with Daz Studio (its free software, but the additional content is extra) which works quite well together with gimp exporter and Spine. In Daz you can make parts of the whole invisible so its quite painless to render all the layers separately and then combine and animate them in Spine. Only the shadows cause a bit extra work as they must be rendered on the undermost layer, separated and attached to the uppermost layer.
