Hey there!

I've never personally used Photon Bolt before, but Spine does have support out of the box for using Mecanim to drive underlying animations. So, depending on how Photon works, it may just require a little work to integrate.

I found this video, which shows how to manage a Spine rig with Mecanim: Unity spine import and mecanim - YouTube
In addition, this thread goes over the setup process as well: Mecanim FSM + Skeleton Animation Example
And this thread covers a bit as well: How to use the Animator/Mecanim with Spine

Let me know if you need any additional help!

Awesome, thanks Erikari!

I've been doing a lot of back and forth thinking on this as well. I came to about the same conclusion that team did, in the sense that I'd like to build a similar 360 degrees pose library. Unfortunately, although my characters are originally being drawn in vector, in the end, I intend to detail them such that there is little to no flat color being used. So it will likely require quite a bit more frames to achieve a smooth rotation effect, I imagine. That's okay though, I think I've decided on solid enough approach to move forward with this.

One of my main concerns before came from the fact that, given how I intend to detail the artwork, I was afraid the AI files would become too large and bulky for my PC to run quickly. Typically, many detailed images (detailed in this case meaning, using unique brushes, textures, gradients, etc.) would be layered on top of each other - and that tends to bog down performance. But I think a possible solution is to keep the poses in separate AI files, but then combine them all in Photoshop once they are ready to be taken into Spine. This way, they are all aligned properly at the setup pose stage in Spine, but I can still keep the files separated in Illustrator. Hopefully the Photoshop file won't be too big, but since I won't be editing the images there, I'm assuming it will likely work fine in this case.

Going to test these theories throughout the rest of the week and see if it works out for me.

Thanks for the help!

Hey Erikari!

Stupid Google Drive hehe. I edited the OP with “shared links” in place of the images. If it’s still not working, let me know.

I’d definitely be curious to see how to do a blink with a mesh. I’ve always worked in traditional animation, where each frame is drawn independently. I never had Flash growing up, so all of this vector and bone based animation stuff’s pretty new to me. As a result, I don’t feel very sure of where I’m supposed to use Spine to achieve quality shortcuts versus where I need traditional frames. Maybe that’s the actual thing I’m stuck on, all in all, who knows?

Are you trying to make an isometric character by chance? Some people said they preferred to have separate skeletons for each direction for that.

You’d think (and boy does it feel like it! lol)!

But actually, no. We’re making a strictly 2D character on a side-scrolling view, but the character just happens to be able to do all sorts of things.

My main reason for needing many angles mostly boils down to a desire for a high quality level of polish.

I was studying the animation style of Rayman Origins & Rayman Legends recently, and I noticed that the characters will often change their facing position mid-animation. For example, Rayman himself will often do 360 flips that have him turning toward and away from the audience. Since Spine is a skeletal based animation tool, and these games were made with (what I assume is) skeletal based animation, I figured there had to be a feasible way to accomplish this in Spine.

But we also need it for practical purposes as well, for things such as ladder climbing and wall scaling. The character would need to turn and face away from the audience to grab the ladder or wall. I considered doing ladders from a 2/3s view, to avoid changing the character’s angle. But I don’t like the way this looks as much.

Also, I’d really like the character to idle on the 2/3s perspective, but as soon as the player begins moving around - the character will turn to face in profile view. I’ve always liked the way this looks, and feel like it adds a bit of polish. You can see the character’s face and expressions best at 2/3s (or when they face the audience entirely), but when the character is mid-action, the perspective looks really weird at 2/3s, which to me, isn’t quite so desirable.

Anyway,

I currently have the following angles planned:

• Foreground View
  Character faces the audience

• Idle View
  2/3s perspective where the character typically idles

• In Between
  An in between angle for polish… Not really used strictly for gameplay, but for animation where the player goes from Idle to Profile

• Profile View
  Used for many of the game’s core mechanics

• Away View
  Opposite 2/3s perspective. Character is facing away from the audience

• Background View
  Character faces the background entirely. Used for ladders and climbing mechanics

Not sure if I’ll need another in between frame between the Profile and Away views or not.

As far as skins go, I’m currently unsure. The game’s story takes place over the course of a year, so I was considering doing the Persona 5 thing, where the characters have a unique outfit per season. So at the very minimum four or five.

Anyway, I hope this information clears a little bit of this up!
I appreciate your willingness to help a lot! This project means the world to me, so any help I get is always very much appreciated.

Hey Erikari - your post above was really helpful. I checked out the other thread you linked off too, and I think I might have solved a few issues I was having. Those new tagging features in the Photoshop script are going to do wonders for me, I believe. I'm going to experiment with my workflow options for a bit, and if I have any additional questions or concerns, I'll let you know. Thank you for your help and fast response!

Erikari a écrit

It's also useful to place rulers in your photoshop document and make the ruler origin be the same as the root position in Spine, this way adding skins/alt poses/VFX/Flying unicorns to your skeletop later on will be way easier.

Hey Erikari! Sorry for reviving a prehistoric thread...

How exactly is this step above done? More specifically - how does artwork need to be arranged in PS to ensure it matches with Spine's root position? I'm not really seeing a clear pattern in regards to artwork placement when importing artwork from PS to Spine - it feels kind of arbitrary to me.

Erikari a écrit

If you have doubts, I'm here to clarify parts (: I'll probably make a video to explain the workflow better in the future.

Any chance you'd still make that video? I've been running into trouble with this thread's main topic, as well. I'll try the steps you listed out on my next work session.

Thanks!