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  • Benefits of using Spine in Unity2D

    anglais

I've worked with HTML5 (canvas, webgl) and JavaScript for a while now, so it was very obvious the performance and size benefits of using spine assets. Now, I've just started learning about Unity2D. The animation features are quite powerful, performance is great, etc. on it's own. Using Spine instead of Unity features for composing animations seemingly adds complexity that I'm not sure is good, yet. So, I'm wondering what are the benefits of using spine assets in a Unity 2D project. The first thought is that I might have better programmatic control of spines, but I'm not sure and haven't seen any examples of this.

Would someone with some experience using Spine and Unity2D share their thoughts?
(Just looking for high-level tips from someone whose gone through the workflow and development.)

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It sounds like you are looking for feedback from other developers using Spine and Unity, so I'll just say you'll likely find Unity's animation stuff is fine for simple things, but animating full characters there will be a pain. Like most things, it usually isn't about whether A can do a job B can't, but it's how well it can do it. Workflow is paramount, especially as projects grow in size.

Day Late for this,
Well Spines is far superior than what ever Unity2D will give you. But like what Nate said, Its workflow and how well the tool helps you. This is going to have to be something you have to figure out. If you used spine before it won't feel any different over in unity, You can still do everything from Loading an animation, to playing one. Spine does however become more easier to use in unity because of the Heiarchy system, The Umbra Occlusion system and some fancy mono/C# serialization via scripts. Unity2D can also help compress your Spine Texture! Very nice feature.

But Unity2D uses there own animation system that is a little to not very nice at all, There node graph system would be somewhat helpful in a 3D game but in 2D, Not so. They also kind of expect you to use Sprite Sheets.... For everything. Unity2D Dev Team Ya, Lets assume the entire market is still somewhere in the limbo of the 80's and 90's.... Though I would be a little hypocritical considering I'm working on a game that has pixel art however I do use spine for making the animations(No SpriteSheet!)

If you have any specific questions(about Unity), you can PM or Email me(<removed>).

Spine is certainly easier to create the animations in, but it's a shame that you can't take advantage of the IK and state system in the new unity stuff. If you treat your char as a series of 3d meshes you can do transform, rotates and scales as well as using sprite changes to handle fold animations in a similar manner to Spine.

Nate, it might be worth considering if life would be easier if you could find a way to export the rig and animations in a manner that would allow unity to import them as avatars and motion files. This would allow the best of both worlds I think and would allow you to clean you hands of maintaining a run time. Flipside I appreciate how much work it would be and I'm having a hard time seeing how the skinning, mesh deformation and stuff would port.

As a quick win, getting the individual meshes spine creates as game objects would be a big boon so that we can do nice things like add colliers without having to map the vert deformations!

Ah cool, exciting stuff! I've got big hopes for Spine - so much so we're rolling it into our current prototype 🙂