Necro'ing this 3d to report the same issue, I can't open Spine after updating to Spine 4, with Pro license.
I get the same error, and I am using Bitdefender antivirus, have no idea if that's the one conflicting.
Fantastic, thank you so much Pharan. The weighted bones work like magic.
Hi community,
I researched in forum and FAQ and I am not able to answer a question
so I post it here. Apologies in advance if it's something super simple that I am missing.
Is there a way to mix vertices position of the same mesh on different tracks?
I have read the documentation (http://it.esotericsoftware.com/spine-meshes#Keying) where it says "All vertices are keyed together. This can make it difficult to animate different parts of the same mesh solely by using deformation[...]."
Still, is there not a blending options available? Imagine a blinking eyes animation, made with FFD, which should play (randomly at runtime) when the head is rotated in different angles. The rotation of the head would happen on a lower track.
The only thing that should be blended is the xy delta on position of that one single vertex of the eye, rather than its actual position.
Thanks!
Hi Pharan, thanks for your reply.
I try to explain myself a bit better:
In order to simulate a perspective view, I have a character whose legs are not both touching the bottom of the Spine Object, only one is. Now, if I add a light to my scene, only the shadow of one leg is correct. If I try to rotate the light around the character (see pics), the right-leg shadow is not correct, due to the fact that is cast from the actual Z position of the Object.
I was then trying to move the leg back on the Z axis through SkeletonUtility, in order to have a correct representation of the shadow. How may I have correct 3D shadow on a 3D object? Is my idea too crazy?
Thanks !
09 Jul 2017, 14:26
BuMp!
Hi and welcome !!! Spine is going to be even more awesome now!
Hi wonderful community,
In order to solve the problem of "floating shadows", which occurs when characters are draws with specific perspectives (see image), I tried out the following approaches:
1) Draw the feet of the character on the same line, so that the bottom of each feet corresponds to the "end" of the spine Object (but in this way, no illusion of depth);
2) Duplicate the Spine anim and make it only cast shadows, move it behind on the Z axis, then make it a child of the main Spine object which will now have shadows disabled (but in this way, apart from the performance concerns of having everything duplicated, the shadows won't match anyway for both feet);
3) Use the SkeletonUtility to Spawn the Hierarchy in Override mode, then move just the left leg on the Z axis, so that the shadow would be cast correctly. This last point is what I am trying to do, but no way: I cannot move the bone on the Z axis from within Unity. Also, when I spawn the hierarchy and change the transform values of any bone, the animations do not play anymore.
Am I trying to do something too weird? Do you have any suggestions on how to achieve that?
Thanks!
25 Jun 2017, 11:12
No-one has any input on this?
Thanks in advance !
Hi there!
I think the best example would be Unity itself:
they have a user-facing roadmap with clear indication of what is delivered when, and in which version (beta or official). toghether with a voting system for new feature requests: https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap.
and they have a one-stop learning centre where they have updated tutorials and scripting APIs per version https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials, https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/index.html. Cool thing is that the tutorial pages embed the YouTube videos, so that they are put in a context.
Obviously behind Unity there is a muuuch bigger organization, I do not expect things to be at the same level, but you asked me, so I answered! 
Dear badlogic,
Sorry for the delay in my response, I have been very busy. Thank you very much for your extensive reply, it makes sense to be aware of what sources are to be considered priorities, so I'll keep an eye on those first.
Still, I would like to propose something else: what about having one person that "owns" the communication with the community? The solution you proposed, in fact, does not solve the issue of me knowing when I'll be having the runtimes for 3.5/3.6 working as smooth as before, and it is not a best practice that the users can talk directly to the developers every time they have an issue: even though it is awesome that the devs reply directly on the forums, in "corporate" world this behavior is not suggested as pushes the dev out of focus and generates unstructured and scattered documentation which is then very hard to put together. The main contact point should be a dedicated subject.
So this "owner" would actively act as a buffer between the users and the devs/support guys, in order to understand and anticipate the issues. This owner would make a list of all open issues and collect the temporary solutions to them, with pros and cons; the owner would also keep a roadmap (short-term, mid-term, long-term) so that the user can plan accordingly. The roadmap involves the concept of prioritization (what should be done first), and ideally the users can vote on what issue should be treated first through surveys.
The User-facing roadmap is different than the product backlog (https://waffle.io/EsotericSoftware/spine), as they serve two different purposes: the latter is a developers' tool, the former is stakeholder oriented. There lies the difference between developers' tasks and users' features, and it is exactly the line I was drawing with my first post: as a user I am not able to understand the waffles and their priority and how they translate to features.
Example where a PM would have been useful: I remember the "SetToSetupPose" behavior, for which there have been dozens of posts of people asking why the anims appeared to have a different behavior in the Spine editor and in Unity. In the end you had to write a dedicated page in the documentation, which is the right thing to do when you see a recurring issue, but this happened after at least one year since I experienced the "issue" myself. If there was a responsible subject whose job was to discover and collect the feedback, you could have optimized the workflow and not have to answer to the same question multiple times.
Finally, I would like to repeat myself saying that you guys are doing a fantastic job in supporting the community, and I do not want my words to sound too harsh behind a keyboard: I think it is only a matter or workflow, not a matter of intention or commitment.
Best !
Hi community,
I use Spine since more than a year, and I am using Unity. I am not super happy with the state of things with the access to the information in Spine, and I'd like to hear your opinion. I will start with three critical situations that happened in the last week:
1) Spine 3.5 broke all my anims, as the setup pose was suddenly being mixed to the anim. I could manage to fix the anims by browsing and then ending up on this thread (Setup pose effecting skeleton when mixing interrupted); I had to trying all the alternative AnimationState.cs posted in there, and only one of them worked even though I had to try both of the amended AnimationState.cs files.
I would like to thank Pharan for providing this solution, but on the other hand I believe there is something wrong with the access to the information: for fixing this problem I had to browse forums for days, reading so many irrelevant comments, scouting for a potential answer, and all of this translates to time wasted.
2) Another example, is the Shaders topic: I'd like to try out normal maps, but every time I look for info, I get lost in multiple threads and it gets frustrating, as I am not a full time animator and I cannot be on top of every single topic, so that it becomes impossible to decode all the info in a reasonable amount of time.
3) Thirdly, the "Spawn hierarchy" feature of the Skeleton Utility. I have been striving to find the difference between the options "follow/override", and I have to guess I get it right from a few lines written here and there in the forums. Still, I am missing the info on what is the difference with using BoneFollower, rather than spawning one bone as follow. What are the pros and cons of each approach? In a similar way, what are the pros of using the SpriteAttacher instead of simply adding a Sprite as a child GameObject to a spawned BoneFollower?
Do you think that there could be a better way of handling knowledge transfer? Maybe a better experimental documentation, or an improved way to organize information? I have the feeling that Spine is handled by a bunch of really great guys, but I am outside of their "inner circle", so every time they are talking (on the forums), they throw a bunch of new and obvious concepts to them, but for me, as external developer that has to catch up, it is really hard to keep the pace and sort things out.
I think that you need something that in software development is usually referred as "product manager", which is a person that -as full time job- collects all the info in one place, prioritizes the issues, handle the communication with the users, provides timelines and keeps a record of what is working, official, experimental, upcoming and broken.
I feel that for being up to date with Spine, I have to do ALL of the following:
I hope this feedback will help improving the access to the information to regular people like me, as I think Spine is a fantastic product and you guys are doing a terrific job in helping out the community, but maybe things could work even better with some structure.
Do you have a screenshot of your transitions in Mecanim? How is your exit-time setting?
Usually playing around with those settings make the trick.
You need to follow exactly this:
Hi, this was an old issue (a month ago), when I was still using Mecanim. I eventually got that solved, but now I am much happier with SkeletonAnimation :mmm:
Hi Pharan,
I first duplicate an entire animation:
Loading Image
Then I select the root bone, and check the Flip X checkbox:
Loading Image
It looks good in Spine, not in Unity :wonder:
Hi great Spine community,
now that my first problem is solved (thanks Pharan! ) I want to ask for help regarding another weird issue.
So here is the thing: I created those nice walk animations, flipping them on the X axis in spine, not at runtime. The weird thing is that -even though all bones have keyed RTS positions, and they look correctly positioned in Spine- their position is not correct when I import them in Unity.
But the weirdest thing (which is not shown in this gif) is that the sprites (meshes) are perfectly fine!
It means that I did not notice this issue until I started playing around with the SkeletonUtility, as the bones where displayed in the scene editor of Unity.
Loading Image
The problem occurs with all my flipped animations, which are top_right, right and bottom_right. You can see it every time the character walks to the right of the screen.
Any idea of why this happens? How can I solve this?
Hi Pharan, thanks: keying every RTS value for each bone gave me the intended result.
I still have some unexpected rotation settings, but I hope I will sort it out myself. Thanks again !
Dear Spine community,
After looking into every related topic on this forum, and using Spine for a couple months now, I decided to ask for help.
I do not seem to be able to mix animations properly in Unity.
Either:
The game is a point&click adventure, so the animation transitions should happen when the character starts walking, and stops walking.
I instantiated the character as SkeletonAnimation, not Mecanim, and my code looks like this (please read inline comments!)
void FixedUpdate() {
// I read the direction & speed parameters from an animator component
if (anim.GetFloat("Speed") != 0) {
int dir = anim.GetInteger("Direction");
// then, if speed > 0.1, I play a different animation according to the direction
switch (dir)
{
case 3:
SetAnim("walk_180_top");
break;
case 0:
SetAnim("walk_0_bottom");
break;
case 1:
SetAnim("walk_270_left");
break;
case 2:
SetAnim("walk_90_right");
break;
case 4:
SetAnim("walk_315_bottom_left");
break;
case 5:
SetAnim("walk_45_bottom_right");
break;
case 6:
SetAnim("walk_225_top_left");
break;
case 7:
SetAnim("walk_135_top_right");
break;
}
}
else
// if speed == 0, then I play some Idle animation.
{
anim.SetInteger("Direction", 4);
SetAnim("idle_315_bottom_left");
}
// While here I define the routine SetAnim
void SetAnim(string name) {
if (name == currentAnimation)
return;
// If I remove the next two lines, the character has wrong rotation values for its bones, missing parts, and also does not swap images in the proper frames.
// If I keep the next two lines, the character does not have ANY transition between states at all, the animations are all super stiff
skeletonanim.skeleton.SetToSetupPose();
skeletonanim.state.ClearTracks();
if (name == "idle_315_bottom_left") {
skeletonanim.state.SetAnimation(0,"idle_315_bottom_left", true);
return;
};
skeletonanim.state.SetAnimation(0, name, true);
currentAnimation = name;
}
Thanks for your help :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang:
11 Oct 2015, 15:12
Additional information:
1) I am using Spine Pro, Unity 5.2, and the Spine Unity runtimes authored on 3rd of August
2) This is the first and last frame of my walk animation:
Loading Image
3) This is my first and last frame of my idle animation:
Loading Image
4) This is my T-pose:
Loading Image
5) This is what happens if I use SetToSetupPose just before setAnim:
(Problem: no transitions-crossfadings, and the character "walks on the spot" and then immediately switches to idle, instead of transitioning to idle)
Loading Image
Loading Image
6) This is what happens if I do not use the above mentioned lines of code:
(Problem: unable to transition to "full" Idle pose, as bones movement are relative)
(The OnGui button sets the Idle animation)
Loading Image
I need to have crossfading and reset of position of the bones. How can I achieve this?