Ce site est optimisé pour être consulté depuis un navigateur moderne dans lequel JavaScript est activé.

Which Should I Use for Character Emotion and Motion Variation: Slots or Skins?

cihpargx

Hello,
I have multiple attachments for a character design project, such as three eyes, three mouths, and three noses. For example, to make it look surprised, I'll select the appropriate attachments for the eyes, mouth, and nose. Then, I'll create the surprised animation. After that, I'll also create the "angry" animation. I'll have two animations: "shocked" and "angry."

To convey these two emotions and create a smooth transition between the two animations, would it make sense to place the attachments within "Slots" or create a "Skin" for each?

Slot
*angry-mouth
*happy-mouth

Texture and Placeholder (Hanger)
*Skin (angry)
*_angry-mouth (attachments)
*Skin (happy)
*_____happy-mouth (attachments)

Spinebot

For your character emotion system with multiple facial variations, I recommend using skin placeholders rather than simple slots. Here's why:

Best Approach: Skin Placeholders

Create skin placeholders for each facial feature type (eyes, mouth, nose), then populate them with different attachments for each emotion. This structure would look like:

Slot: mouth

Skin placeholder: mouth-surprised
- Attachment: mouth-surprised-happy
- Attachment (in different skin): mouth-surprised-sad
Skin placeholder: mouth-angry
- Attachment: mouth-angry-happy
- Attachment (in different skin): mouth-angry-sad

Why This Works Better:

Animation Reusability: Your animations reference the skin placeholders (like "mouth-surprised"), not specific attachments. This means the same "surprised" animation can work with different character variations or skins without recreating the animation.
Flexible Combinations: You can create character variations (like different costume sets or character types) and the same emotional animations will work automatically with all of them.
Cleaner Animation Workflow: Animations show and hide skin placeholders. The actual attachments shown come from whichever skins are currently active, allowing animations to be used with any skins.

Setup Steps:

Create a skin placeholder for each emotion state (surprised-mouth, angry-mouth, etc.)
With your first skin active, place the appropriate attachment in each placeholder
Switch to other skins and populate the same placeholders with their variants
Animate by keying which skin placeholder is visible, not which specific attachment

If you only have one character design and won't need variations, you could use simple slots with multiple attachments. However, skin placeholders provide much more flexibility for future expansion without requiring animation changes.

cihpargx

Spinebot First, I opened my character in Spine using the PSD file. I converted the attachments to a mesh. Then, I created skins and moved these attachments to their corresponding skins. Now I want to move on to the boning system. Is this the correct order? So, can I start boning after creating the skins?

Misaki

cihpargx Even after adding a mesh attachment to the skin, you can still bind bones to that mesh or set the weights for each vertex.

Spinebot’s response appears to have overlooked your intention to create a smooth transition between the two animations, which is an important point to consider. While expressions can be changed through either animations or skins, skin changes do not provide smooth transitions. Animations, on the other hand, allow you to use mix (crossfade).

For instance, if you convert each mouth attachment into a mesh attachment and use bones to move it vertically to open and close it, animation-based expression changes allow you to blend from the open-mouth expression animation to the closed-mouth expression animation. This enables you to smoothly adjust the bone transform while simultaneously switching the attachment to the closed-mouth version. For this reason, when a smooth transition is required, animations offer more straightforward control.