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Sprite Sheets with Spine

tjbrunetto

Hi Esoteric Team,

I have a few dynamic animations for my character that need to be created that would not look good with bone based animation, and thus I will be using sprite sheets for these specific animations. I have a few questions here. Is Spine able to import full sprite sheets into the editor? Also will the editor then know to mix animations between the first frame of the sprite sheet or the last frame of the sprite sheet when heading back towards a bone based animation?

I am curious because I know that these sprite sheets may not have any bones, etc attached to them so I think it would be impossible to have the animation mix with the sprite sheets.

Tim

Erika

Hello tjbrunetto,
You can import a sequence of images in Spine just like any other image: this means you can for example drag all the images of the sequence under a slot so that they will be all aligned, then in Animate mode you can set a key for the visibility of each attachment of the sequence to animate it.

Improvements on this workflow are planned: Frame-by-frame animation support · #9 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor

For now there's a couple scripts that can help you speed up the process of keying the sequence:
[suggestion] auto swap for imported frame animations
Quick method of creating animation from frame images

When you talk about animation mix, what do you have in mind?
You can manually set mixes for animations, a mix happens when two different values are keyed for the same property, so if a property is not keyed in one of the two, it won't get mixed. In the case of frame-by-frame animations, the keys have an active state, or a disabled state, so they can't really be mixed, therefore they simply will override a previous animation.

tjbrunetto

My primary concern is that when the character is transitioning from the sprite sheet animation to the bone based animation, the sprite sheet animation will need as many custom animation transitions as there are possible animation states that it can enter from said pose.

For Example: If I have a claw attack with a cat, and I have the attack dynamically drawn, at the end of the sprite sheet of cat swiping attacks, I would then have to create a sprite sheet for each animation transition, IE, Cat Idle, Cat Walking, Cat Running, Cat Pounce, Cat Death, etc. Without interpolating between these animation states manually you would need to create a ton of custom animation transitions.

Erika

I think you could bypass this problem by matching the pose of the spritesheet animation with your regular skeleton, so that when the images sequence ends, Spine can do its usual magic and interpolate the pose for you, which is a common use case. If it's combat moves usually having less or no interpolation makes an attack animation feel more reactive, so it might not even be that bad. If you can share the sketches of the poses you had in mind I'd be happy to help think it out 🙂

tjbrunetto

Hi Erikari,

That is an awesome idea! I will definitely try something like that in the future. For now I am not in need of any assistance but I may be in the future.

Tim

Erikari,

If I have 4 different skins, one is my character wearing normal gear holding a shotgun, another is my character holding a handgun, magnum, and sniper rifle. If I wanted to add different colored workboots to all of these skins would I need to double these skins so that it was like this?

Character_Shotgun_Skin
Character_Shotgun_Workboots_Skin
Character_Handgun_Skin
Character_Handgun_Workboots_Skin
Character_Magnum_Skin
Character_Magnum_Workboots_Skin
Character_Sniper_Rifle_Skin
Character_Sniper_Rifle_Workboots_Skin

Or is there a better way to go about doing this? I am going to have a lot of weapon skins in my game and doubling and tripling them based upon clothing options for the player seems like it will clutter the project really quickly.

Tim

Erika

Considering your special case of wanting to have unique frames for attacks, I'd separate the boots in those frames so that they can be recolored by code.
The best scenario would be one where pieces can be mixed and matched, so each piece has its own skin, and you draw the alternate poses specifically for them. I cannot stress enough how versatile Spine can be when it comes to mesh deformations, you likely can get away with deforming a new pose, therefore needing to draw less frames, if you plan your character accordingly.

No matter what you choose to do, what you're attempting will require a lot of work! I'd really love to see what you end up creating, it seems very interesting and technically challenging!

tjbrunetto

Hi Erikari,

From what I am gathering it is not possible to have two skins active at the same time. If I wanted to mix and match skins I would not be able to do so. Basically I have a few cosmetic adjustments that are going to occur in the game. The weapon skin the player is using may not change so I cannot simply have the player active with the Magnum skin and the silly hat skin at the same time. I would need both a regular magnum skin and a magnum + silly hat skin in order to make all of the animations work.

There isn't a way to adjust one part of the image, replacing hats, without changing the skin is there?

Harald

You can have two skins active at the same time by combining multiple skins to a new skin.

See this forum thread here:
Combining Skins
And also this forum thread:
Mix and Match with Skins

Erika

Can't you combine two skins because of a custom game engine limitation?

Perhaps it would make more sense to have guns active only in their specific animations, and the hats as skins maybe? It would be so much easier if you could use the latest features though!

You could of course also append the correct hat or recolor the boots at runtime, but it sounds like your game engine may be very limited?

Harald

If he has not switched to a different engine, Tim is using Unity, so it is capable of combining skins technically.

tjbrunetto

Hi Esoteric Team,

Thank you for the responses I have a million things going on right now and lost track of the responses until now. I am taking a look at the two links that you sent my way Harald. Thank you for this advice that seems perfect for what I am looking for and will give me a lot of flexibility moving forward!

Tim

Harald

Great to hear it helped, thanks for getting back to us.