Fuse Breaker लिखाduring this tutorial he says the Straight Ahead Approach is good for animations that are handled with physics yet as he is animating he is making the character move to the right away from the original root position.
Whether the character is jumping straight up or to the right, considering physics is involved when modeling the movement.
Fuse Breaker लिखाSay the player jumps straight up, wouldn't that cause the animation to look like the character is jumping forward when it's not?
Sure, but this animation is for the character jumping to the right. I doubt it was intended to be used to jump straight up (or backward, etc).
FWIW, often the character movement is managed in the game toolkit, so in Spine you don't want the root bone moving around. Instead, at runtime the whole skeleton is moved around by the game code. However, it can be difficult to animate something like a jump to the right without moving the root bone up and to the right. In that case you can animate it by moving the root bone, then remove the root bone animation afterward.
Note you'll still need to work with your programmer to match the skeleton movement to the animation. One way to do this is by trial and error. You might design the gameplay movement first, then build the animations to match. For walking or running ghosting can be very useful. The X offset ghosting setting can be set to match the X speed of the skeleton movement at runtime, then you can see in Spine if the feet will be sliding. That is explained here:
Ghosting - Spine User Guide: Offset
There are other ways, too. You could use 2 animations, jump and moving-the-root-bone, then combine them in Preview. At runtime you wouldn't use the moving-the-root-bone animation.
There is also an approach call "root motion", which is where you do animate the root bone in Spine, then at runtime that movement is removed from the root bone and instead applied to the whole skeleton. For example, consider a shambling zombie that walks with jerky movements. It could be very difficulty to match the movement of the skeleton position in the game world to the jerky walk animation using code like skeleton.x += xAmount. Using root motion gives the animator very fine control of the skeleton position. Root motion is relatively advanced as there's some complexity extracting the root motion and applying it to the skeleton, and some consideration is needed when both the game code and root motion want to move the skeleton at the same time. I believe we have something to help with root motion in spine-unity, but not in the other Spine Runtimes.
