@SoulKarl, thanks for the thoughtful post. Likely you're experiencing a mix of things. 4.0 is the first release of a very complex feature and it's a big change from what you are used to. It took us a lot of time and effort to get it where it is. Releasing it and getting it stable are required for it to be a solid foundation for us to continue improving it.
SoulKarl लिखाI have found things that are easier to perform in the 4.0 graph editor, but being unable to go back to old methods in other areas makes it difficult to experiment with and slowly move over fully to just the graph editor.
The old graph had to go for a few reasons. One is that we'd like the new graph to do everything the old one can do, if not better then at least as well. Another is that the new graph required a complete overhaul of just about everything. All of the internals for the dopesheet, how selections are made, how keys and curves are stored and applied, everything under the covers is new. The old graph could not just be kept around, it had to be nuked. If we wanted it, we'd have to rebuild it with our new systems. We have a long list of things we want to do. If we held off releasing until everything was done, we'd never release. I don't know if the old graph should be on that list, but even if it was, it still couldn't have gotten done for 4.0.
As mentioned, I'd prefer to find ways to completely replace the old graph with the new one. Identifying what the old one can do better is good and helps us consider how the new one needs to be improved.
If that were to prove impossible, there are still new challenges even if we wanted to bring the old graph back. The old graph can only give a myopic view of the 2 handles between keys. If you move a handle, the handle on the other side of the key needs to move to keep the curve passing through the key smooth. If we don't do that, you'd get a cusp (a sharp bend in the curve). If we do that, you can't see how you are changing the neighboring curve. It can't be drawn on the old graph due to the way it shows curves. You could see it on the new graph while you make adjustments on the old graph, but I'm not sure that makes for a good user interface.
let's look at what the DEFAULT (and really only) preset options get us in 4.0:
Using the store tool we can see the difference between a custom preset and the new default preset.
There are presets for auto, ease in, out, bounce, but yeah there aren't arbitrary presets you can store and apply to any key. That kind of preset is gone for similar reasons to the graph. There wasn't time and the feature is no longer as good of a fit as it was previously.
Your example is maybe not great since the stored curve is already very similar. The default/auto preset is ease in/out and the ease in and ease out presets get you close if you need that. Can you show a preset you store in 3.8 that those presets don't get you close?
As it stands I can currently make this work by doing everything in 3.8, then forking the file to a 4.0 copy and editing further from there.
Nooo this is not a great workflow. 🙁
Full Chart example. This is obviously unusable as is, and I'm assuming was never meant to really be played with:
Yep, the graph is generally intended for viewing a relatively small number of curves at once.
Single Control Transform. The base x+y values are far apart enough that they cannot be viewed in tandem without mostly flattening the curves.
This is a good point. However, there are some options. You are not required to use auto frame all the time. Often it works well, especially for shorter animations, but it's just not possible for auto frame to always provide the best view of your curves.
For a translate timeline in the graph, you can click a key, ctrl+A to select all keys for that curve, then click Frame (or setup a hotkey). That will frame just the selected keys. With the curves in your example, you won't be able to see the other curve, but you won't have to separate X and Y.
You can have more control over the axes zoom by holding alt and dragging the right mouse button. This can quickly get you to the view of a curve that you need.
We have considered other features to help with this. One is to normalize the Y axis, so all the curves are shown in the same space. This can be helpful, but it hides the magnitude of the values and so isn't useful for all curves (such as those that change only slightly) and isn't useful for comparing curves relatively. On top of that we could provide "stacked graphs", where each normalized curve gets it own graph, possibly with curves using the same units sharing a graph.
Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this if you got this far. I really don't want to come off like I'm just complaining arbitrarily and begging for a superfluous feature.
Not at all. It's your job to have problems and our job to find the best way to solve them. 🙂
The addition of custom curve presets would make a huge difference for me, and would actually allow me to slowly adapt to the 4.0 architecture, rather than being thrown into the deep end from the outset.
I have to wonder if presets would make as big a difference as you expect. You'd apply a preset, then need to fix it up. You can do that with the 4.0 default presets, even if maybe they don't get you super close to start with. I have a feeling the issues are elsewhere, maybe with control of the graph view, getting the right selection to do what you need, with transferring curves from one key to another, or maybe with setting multiple curves at once.
One of the old graph's strengths was that you could set the curve for multiple keys at once. It is not always great to have multiple curves using the same interpolation and the old graph made curves that have a cusp at nearly every key, but it was certainly fast to get some sort of curve somewhat close to what you want. When that is good enough, it's very fast. When it's not good enough, in < 4.0 it is difficult to make the curves better from there.
Have you seen our Animating with Spine videos? Have you done the exercises with 4.0? It would be interesting to hear how you do and see the results. I know it can take quite a bit of time to do the exercises, but I think you'd find it worthwhile. We'll have the 4th video up in a week or so!
Lastly, it may be helpful to come at it from another angle. Instead of getting bogged down in the lowest level, setting individual keys and moving handles, you might try a pose-to-pose workflow using the favor tool. It can be an extremely fast way to animate and the results don't suffer for it, the quality can be as high or higher than other approaches.
We'll continue working on the graph in 4.1 and beyond. It's helpful to get early feedback, so be sure to check out the beta, even if you don't move your projects to it at that time. Note we haven't started much work on 4.1 yet. We want to, but we are still working on 4.0 stability. It's quite good, the most stable Spine has every been actually, but issues do keep cropping up daily and kill our time.
