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  • UE4 Spine: adding a hat prop to a hundred characters

    anglais

Hi I am a customer trying to make a UE4 mobile game with Spine assets.

If you have a game of a hundred finished characters, and then 6 months later you get a request to add a special holiday hat to all the characters, how would you do that? Can we make a new individual Spine asset for the hat and attach it as a prop to existing UE4 Spine assets without having to re-author the original characters? The best way for us to do it would be to make one standalone hat asset and attach it to a “bone” or Spine Slot on each character, not append the hat to each character’s packed texture. Does the Spine workflow have something similar to UE4 Bone sockets (like Spine Slots), where you can attach any prop to any existing socket (Spine Slot). We also want props to be shared across many different characters, for example, archetype Hero B has 9 different swords that can be shared across 12 different Hero B skins, or even shared between different character archetypes. Can these props be shared? Can we attach props to characters in UE4, each with their own scale and orientation? Can props be animated with their own animations?

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spine-ue4 comes with a bone following component that can be used to position another UE4 object at a bone's location, see spine-ue4 Runtime Documentation: Skeleton Follower Component. The depth offset](spine-ue4 Runtime Documentation: Depth Offset) can be used to avoid z-fighting between the basic Spine skeleton and the object you render. One problem with this approach is that the update order of the Spine skeleton and your hat object can't be fixed. This means that the bone location might be calculated after your hat object sets its own position based on the previous frame's location. With exagerated movements, you might see a 1 frame lag. You will be able to implement the strategy you outlined, but I believe this is not the best option.

If you do a holiday update, chances are that you'll have to push a new APK/IPA anyways. Repackaging the texture atlases of your skeletons and their attachments will likely be part of your asset pipeline for deployments. This lets your artists do all their work in Spine, and doesn't have any of the coordination downsides of the other approach.