- Modifié
[Feature Request] Animation Mixer
I know we have the Preview view. But it doesn't work well when I want to design loger sequences or combination of multiple animations and skeletons and have them start at the same time or start with specific delayed timings or trigger the same animation at irregular intervals or loop a certen number of etc. As it stand now I have to do a whole lot of work by temporarily moving keys around for many animations when designing a sequence and then I have to move all those back to the original start point before exporting but then if it needs tweaking I'll have to go do it all over again.
Would it be possible to create a Animation Mixer where you can select what animations and when and how to play them in an Animation Mixer View and Mixer Timeline similar to dope sheet?
Also After Effects have pre-comps which you can place in another comp and then you can place multiples of them at different locations and have them loop or play once at varying points in time is some what comparable but I guess most 3D programs Animation Mixers are even a better comparison.
This could be both used to set up a way to preview a set of animations but could potentially also be exported as a sequence to be played in eg Pixi runtime.
We'd like to provide more in this area. It makes sense to keep it close to how animations are usually applied at runtime using AnimationState, which means likely preview would get added features.
We have limited resources compared to eg Adobe and need to balance where we spend our efforts. A dopesheet-like interface would be great and we can get to that eventually, but it may make sense to first add lower effort features that get us most of the way.
A stopgap might be that preview gets a "record" button that stores the animation changes you make under a name in a list. I know this is somewhat awkward, but it can help to set the speed low to give more time to make the animations changes on various tracks and to increase accuracy of the change timing.
One of the thing I do frequently is making one animation on a skeleton that I later need to preview in multiple locations on a grid but with slight offset in timing. After Effects pre-comp is great for this, but as we has shifted our pipeline more towards Spine I lack an easy way of doing this kind of work. Preferably I only want one skeleton and one animation to tweak, I don't want to duplicate the skeleton to all the grid positions and as soon as I need to tweak the animation I'll have to delete all the copies and redo the whole process which is arduous.
And some times I make longer sequences where an animation repeats at different timings and locations. And some times I have other elements like a waterfall that keeps looping.
I completely understand you have to be elective of your dev time but I dearly which for an ability to create a singular instance of skeleton and or animation, easily tweaked, that later can be played at select times and locations whiteout having to resort to duplicate and delete skeletons and animation over and over. That I why I think an Animation Mixer and perhaps Clones/Instances of skeletons w animations would be a life saver in my kind of work.