How to Copy Bones and Animations Keys to Another Skeleton?

JSpin · 22 oct. 2020

Hi, so I have a project with a couple of completely different characters but they all should have the exact same animated frame. The frame is already animated with a bone hierarchy, meshes and png sequence on one character. It took a while to set this up. Now I need to copy this frame to the other characters but only the bone structure is moved the the other skeletons, not the animation keys, not the slot with the full png sequence, not slot keys with alpha and color animation and attachment visibility. When I try to manually select and copy animation keys, nothing happens.

How do I get my animated frame with bone hierarchy with attachments and png sequences onto another character, I don't have time and sanity to redo this animation over and for all the characters. And the frame can't be a singe skeleton, it has to be integrated with each character.

Sstikkanimate · 22 oct. 2020

Click the Spine button > Import Project

Choose the 'Animation' button then import the project you want copied and select the animation(s) with the keys you want.

This will create a new Animation in your animations list. You can then copy the keys from the same bone to another animation so long as the hierarchy is intact. If the hierarchy isn't intact, choose 'Skeleton' instead of 'Animation' and this will place a skeleton above your current one. You can manually move the bones and such into your current skeleton.

Also, just read about your frame needing to be the same for each character. It wont work that way unless your characters all share the same attachment, slot, bone filenames.

JSpin · 23 oct. 2020

Thanks, I followed this answer on Discord.

If I get it right..

Open Import Project from File Menu and Import skeleton(name it B) from which you want some part (arm or leg)

Duplicate the leg from imported skeleton

Move that leg with all hierarchy into the main skeleton(Name it A)

Now open Import project and select Animation to import selected animation from B skeleton to A

While importing make sure hierarchy in A is the same as in B
and wait for @Erika , she is super good at merging this kind of stuff

This worked partially. It didn't fully work on my PNG sequences slots, the color/alpha keys were completely ignored for these slots. But it's much better than noting for sure.

I cant believe Spine just cant copy a bunch of bones with their keyframes intact to another skeleton. If there is complex setups with constraint, just give me a warning but still copy what it can. And just let me copy what ever range of keys from a bone on the timeline onto another skeleton's bone as well. Can we please make this possible, it would save a lot of time and be more intuitive.
BTW after duplicating the hierarchy, it adds a 2 or increases the numbering of each bone and slot after moving it to the new skeleton, I have to go through each bone and rename them or the import animation wont work. It would be great if we could just drag the top of the hierarchy I wanted to copy onto the other skeleton with Alt key pressed (like the way you duplicate layers in Photoshop) and it would get duplicated with the names intact (as well as preserving animation keys).

And could we please have us a new PNG Sequence Attachment type as well as I use a lot of image sequences for particle explosions, fire and such. Having to manually select control each frames visibly gets old quickly. If we just had to set what ever frame keys, where ever ever, we wanted it could interpolate between those keys. And we could also freely animate draw order if that is needed.

Erika · 26 oct. 2020

Hello JSpin,

To import a part of a skeleton into another skeleton, you need to first move the part of the skeleton that you want to import by dragging and dropping it into the new skeleton, then reimport the animations.

For this to work the names need to be exactly the same for every part of the animation. So the slot names need to match, as well as the attachment and bone names, or it won't work.

Constraints get lost when moving things from a skeleton to another as well as when you duplicate them, but it is planned to add this feature in the future:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/183

Frame-by-frame support is also planned:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/9

Therefore, the current best way to import the frame taking this into account is:

make sure that you don't have anithing that already has the same name in the skeleton that needs to receive the new parts.
If your source skeleton has skins, you may want to either create a skin with the same name in the receiving skeleton and ensure both are active when performing the following steps, or temporarily remove the skin and save a copy of the source skeleton for importing purposes.
import the skeleton that has the part you want into the project with the skeleton that has to receive it using Import Project and choosing Skeleton
Import - Spine User Guide: Skeleton
if you have a mixture of slots and bones, create a bone to parent everything to it (and facilitate the next step), otherwise
select the parent bone of the hierarchy you want to import, then drag and drop it under the root of the other skeleton that has to receive it.
recreate any constraints that are lost.
if any naming discrepancies are present, you may want to use find and replace to fix them (but this procedure should have not created them if you followed it and fixed the naming in the receiving skeleton beforehand) Tree - Spine User Guide: Find and Replace
use Import project and import the animations Import - Spine User Guide: Animation

If your attachments didn't receive the animation, it must be because the names didn't match properly. Ensure they match and it will work.

By the way you can also select multiple slots at the same time and animate their alpha in one go, then offset them as appropriate. You can also copy the keyframes from one slot and paste them onto another.

I agree this process could be simplified, we'll get there! We started from not being able to move things from one skeleton to another at all, we'll get to iron out these and so many of the improvements on our roadmap when we finish the big effort on the curve editor: Spine Roadmap

Please let me know if you still encountered issues, as someone who uses this procedure a lot, I'm confident it should give you better results, but I'm here in case you require further assistance!