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  • Animating with Sound

I'm very impressed with the demo of Spine. Loving the ease of use and it's got some excellent little features I know I can use in animations. But I'm about to start a project that's hugely music based. Every single character will have at least a dance animation, and some will need lip syncing and other musical events. I really want to use this program, but from what I understand it's missing the ability to put audio files into the animation. Without being able to scrub through the sound frame by frame or play back the animation with synced up audio makes it basically a dud for my current purposes (which makes me growl because it looks like a blast to animate with). Has anyone got workarounds for tackling this sort of task? I've heard people say that this a feature on the devs' to-do list, but how big is this list anyway?

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  • تم التحرير

At runtime you can run your animations with your audio time, so the animations can be perfectly in sync. You're right though that there is currently no way to play audio within Spine, sorry. It is planned.

Any ideas for workarounds, or a program more suitable to this kind of animation work? I suppose if I can get the animation into a playable form in Unity fast enough I could switch back and forth as I work, but that's a pretty long shot.

You can calculate a time in your audio to a frame in Spine (which uses 30 fps), though this workflow isn't great. Not sure what other tools could do it, sorry. 🙁

2 أعوام لاحقا

I'd love to be able to do cutscenes with actual lipsync or short animated scenes to audio. It would be a awesome addition if it could be added.

The workaround for now like you suggested, is to make "X-sheets" like the old fashion way.


Its been a year and there's still no audio support?

Not yet, sorry.

If using a runtime and you only want lipsync, it wouldn't be hard at all. Papagayo should be able to export phoneme data for audio. At runtime you play an animation and check the animation time against the phoneme data. When the data says the mouth shape changes, you just change the attachment for the mouth. Super easy!

If you want to do more, like you already have the audio and want to animate to match, then Spine support to playback audio would be much more convenient than doing it blind.

شهر واحد لاحقا

This might seem like a silly idea for lip syncing but it seems to work for me right now. I have a program like After Effects or Premiere open in the background. Really it could be any audio program.

Then I open Spine on top of it. I adjust my timeline windows to line up. Then I scale the timeline in both programs to be nearly the same size. So I can at least see the wave form while animating. Once you get going it's easy to toggle between apps to listen or start a new animation.

This has really made my work flow a lot faster. Sometimes I have to go back to the audio program to hear something to make sure I'm getting a motion right. It's nice having that visual there.

You can see at the bottom of the frame how my timelines are lined up.

Hope this helps.

شهر واحد لاحقا

Someone made a modded version of papagayo that creates x-sheets of the clip, and can export it as a .xsl file.

Perhaps there's someone who can write a tool that translates between the .xsl and the spine json file to bring in keyframes at the specified frames?

Pagayo MOD: http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5323

what does the above do?

عام واحد لاحقا

So, did something happen in the last 3 years? When I bought the professional yesterday I somehow thought that importing Audio would be implemented in this software. But I can't find anything that helps me sync my animation to an audio. So... How do you animate to a speaker then, isn't this quite essential to an animation software?

There have been many, many (many) things that have needed doing in the last 3 years. Audio is coming to Spine in v3.7 (we are currently finishing up v3.6). Until then we've provided a workaround so you can sync audio with Spine playback:
Spine Plugin in Support

Nate wrote

Audio is coming to Spine in v3.7 (we are currently finishing up v3.6).

Wow! Congratulations!😃 finally😃 :party:

4 أعوام لاحقا

And... how did it go with this sound in spine? 😉
I'm just trying to get voice over into spine scene, and... without success.
Audio file is available in spine, i'm creating an event from this file, set the key on this event,
even get the wavefront in audio timeline, but... can't hear anything...

I'm in spine version 3.8.99
sound format is mp3
i also have tried wave format but have some kind of issues, and can't find what it is, it just displays an exclamation mark
next to an event linked to the audio file (wave formats was in 32bit and was also tried 16bit version)

Is there some more information on how to configure it properly?

You can look in your spine.log for more information on any errors. You should see something like OpenAL 1.1, Default audio device if the audio device was recognized correctly. You can also find any errors there if a file cannot be read.

WAV files need to be PCM, 1 or 2 channels, and 16 bits per sample.

If you see the file in the audio view, then it has loaded the file correctly. Do you have multiple audio devices? You can choose which to use in the audio view. I assume the volume in the audio view is 100 and not muted?

If you are still having trouble, please post or email an audio file and we can take a look. contact@esotericsoftware.com

ok, thank you for the quick answer 🙂
good to know about the log file, I do not have multiple devices, and no it was not muted 🙂

but in this case this .bat file with some code I found elsewhere in this forum:
http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/Spine-Plugin-in-Support-5859?p=36136#p36136
helped me to kick off, luckily 🙂

I simply run this .bat file once on my pc and now it works as it should.

Thanks again

Hmm, that was from 3.5+ years ago. 3.8.99 doesn't support the `


server 4567parameter and no longer provides the functionality theplay.jarfile uses. I'm guessing 3.8.99 audio started working for some other mysterious reason, unrelated toplay.jar` or the bat file. I am glad it is working for you now though!