The new Spine feature

Hi,

can you please explain me what could be theoretically achieved by the new Spine feature which is supported since the current 4.2.5 version of Visionaire? Thanks.

With Spine, you create a character as pieces. So their head, torso, upper arm, forearm and hand, etc., could all be separate pieces. Then in Spine you define how those pieces are attached to each other and how they bend. Then you define the animation for a walk, run or any other action based on rotating and bending those pieces.

Although this seems like a lot of work, once you have one character done, your next character can be built upon the same kind of rig and should go faster.

Essentially, when done, you will be able to have a character that can have complex movement for very little artwork. Using Spine should make your game smaller without losing quality. In fact, since it costs less in storage and artwork, you can have a lot more animations for your characters and raise the quality of your game.

Adjusting an animation is as simple as adjusting the animation in Spine and exporting the character again. It wouldn't require an artist to redo a lot of frames of animation.

Spine characters could also be used for things that are not normally characters such as a swaying tree or some other scene object that could require jointed movement. In non-visionaire games, Spine is often used for animated GUI's and other types of animations.

Thanks, i wans't sure what this feature is for. It sounds interesing, but i guess you can't mix it with frame by frame? Sometimes using only bones can make it looks flat.

It works on both bones & keyframe animations. Because you can directly swap out sprite parts you could probably hide all currently displayed sprite parts & show a solid animation frame instead.

One of the good things with sprite part animation is that you could create different outfits (as in clothes, hair styles, facial expressions, accessories, etc) & swap out parts of them during runtime. So you would have a single animation that can be changed on the fly. Think of it as a feature you could implement into your game, where the player could opt to dress up their character or play as another character.

Daedalic used Spine to make Fire.

The downside to sprite part animation is that it's mostly intended for side-scrolling games. Walk animations towards the North or South tend to look a bit shitty.

Well i can't imagine doing animations without Flash ( now Animate ) at this moment. I was mostly interested in what it is.
But it sounds interesting.. the variety of cloths, but i have quite a lot custom animations, it's not just walk and take animation, so i guess that makes that complicated.

What i was hoping is that maybe it's something it could help to me to create more dynamic animations as there is only one speaking animation and it needs to be simple because it's a loop. I can't combine speaking with some gestures and so on.

Hmm yeah that's the point of it. You can swap out any sprite part at run time. So you could play a gesture animation & then change facial sprite parts to change mouth shape / facial expression etc - at least in theory as I've not used it yet.

Really? Probably i'm just confused about what it really is, anyway i have no idea how to use it though, but if i could do something like that then its worth a try.

Did you check out the showcase video on their website? The mesh warping tool that it shows in the video at some point unfortunately only comes with the pro version which is a little bit pricey if I remember correctly. I think though it would probably actually be a pretty decent bit of software for you to make your animated youtube videos with - might actually save some time too - as it's not just for creating animations for games.

Ehh no, but i did take a look now & i don't know i don't like the style much of the animations i prefer more drawed style. I will take a look at it though, at some youtube videos or tutorials and i will see

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Did you check out the showcase video on their website?

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On visionaire-studio.net? I didn't find it.

This is the official site http://esotericsoftware.com/