Hey everyone! I'm trying to learn how to use Spine and I'm looking for some advice on how to set up the art or bones to make the project look better. Currently the assets I've created work well when bending with the drawing, but gets very distorted when bending away. I've got the torso bound to the leg bone, and the leg bone bound to the torso bone. e.g. the right leg looks pretty good when bending backwards.
But when it goes the other way, everything distorts horribly.
Here's the individual parts if it helps.
Is there any advice on how to set up the drawing/any additional bones I should add in to make this work better? Thank you guys in advance!
Starting Spine animation, need some help!
Illyramnaa Hi, welcome to the Spine forum!
It is difficult to explain well in writing, so I have created a simple example on this issue:
Basically, the solution for your issue is to devise the hip mesh. Although some vertices are a bit useless, the movement of the vertices of the hip mesh looks like the following animated GIF:
Add vertices with the idea of separating the areas you want to deform from the areas you do not want to deform. In this example, the areas you do not want to deform should be around the button and the zipper, so I added vertices around them and gave those vertices weights against the parent bone of the hip mesh so that they cannot be deformed.
I also placed some vertices near the seam line that spans the hip mesh and the front-leg mesh, and aligned that vertices and gave the same weights on both meshes:
This ensures that the seam line does not shift when the front-leg is animated. In fact, if I remove the vertices of the front-leg mesh, it will look shifted like this:
If you want to align the vertices of one mesh with the vertices of another mesh, it is useful to check the Wireframe option:
You can download the Spine project and PSD of this simple skeleton here:
I hope this will help you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to even make a sample project!! It was incredibly helpful in helping me figure this out, and it's a good framework to help me set up future characters. It's looking a lot better now, thanks again!
Illyramnaa Great to hear that!! I really like your art and I would be happy if you would share the finished animation with us when it is ready
I'm flattered, I definitely will! I feel like I'd probably need more advice in the future too haha