Hi there,
First of all, Spine is absolutely amazing and a breeze to animate with, but I think it really needs to scale up as it has become a mature and production ready tool.
I posted a thread on "Tags to filter assets" in editor that was the staring point of this idea > http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/viewt ... =11&t=1998
I really feel like Spine is not scaling up to more complex project as well as it could and should. We get nice and complex animation tools, but not really a way to get everything to the next level in term of global project complexity.
In editor, there's basically no way to organise and filter objects or group of objects, yet.
This is, in my opinion, absolutely needed if you want to see Spine used on complex projects(in our production we're really suffering from the lack of editor tools to organise with bunch of assets).
Our project has a minimum of 2 realistic looking(means realistic animations and realistic details) characters, 5 mounts, 40 Gear Sets per character, realistic looking animations for ALL(see below why they all have to be in the same Spine file and why Gear has to be parented to the characters skeletons).
Here's a screenshot of what we have to deal with and go through by hand in order to work on a given GearSet on a given Character Skeleton. Note that this represents only 1 character skeleton with 3 GearSets, there should 40 per character.
Note we are using colour coded bones right to find stuff, not ideal, but kind of works, still we have to go object by object to activate theGear we want to work on.
(Click on the picture to expand)
What is the plan for Spine about that ?
Layers ? Tags ? Referencing external Spine projects(think Maya) ?
We need a way to filter and organise the data we're dealing with.
Not only can it get too much data in the Skeleton, it can as well get too much data in the Spine project itself.
Not that Spine is not capable of handeling hundreds of skeletons, bones and slots, yes it is, but more like there's no way for us to organise and work with that in a non ultra frustrating way.
Here's our project's scenario,what we're dealing with right now, at a basic level.
2 realistic looking(means realistic animations and realistic details) characters, 5 mounts, 40 Gear Sets per character, realistic looking animations for ALL. Doesn't sound like a lot on paper, right ?? Sounds like manageable. But in Spine, it's not. The freedom we gain on one side with animation is lost with workflow in Editor.
It just gets frustrating to find back the objects we want to work on in skeletons containing up to 500 bones and slots, when you have 6 to 10 skeletons in the same Spine file.
Please do not propose me to separate the Gear in different skeletons or the Mounts in a separate Spine file, this is not possible for us without sacrificing the animation quality.
Gear pieces HAVE to be parented to characters bones as we absolutely need to them to follow the characters bones motion(the Gear itself is animated as well, not just "plugged in", so it needs perfect timing), we end up having skeletons in editor with hundreds of bones and slots(we filter that at runtime down to something that runs) > a proper organisation solution like show/hide editor objects based on "tags" would make all this soooooooooooo much easier. Select the tags to display > "show" > work on your stuff > select tag to display > "hide" > the file is clean for the next person to work on it.
I mean, look, when I open my animators file and want to check the Gear7 on the 2nd character, I don't even know exactly where all the gear pieces are nested. I gotta to ask them to show me where they are, if they even remember, because they worked on that Gear a month ago.
Mounts and Characters sync is hard to achieve because they are and have to be separate skeletons in our project. Again we need perfect timing to not break the effect. Yes we can play the animations together in the same Spine file, but no we can't parent the character to the mount to work best.
External files referencing would probably allow us to do that.
Nested animations would permit that as well, if we're able to edit the nested animation in place. If not, again, good timing, will be just not achievable.
I know there's in editor a selection set of 10 selections you can save and retrieve, but we need nearly a hundred in our current project.
2 characters X 40 GearSets + 5 Mounts X 4 Gears = 100
Currently every time animators want to work on a given Gear Set, one has to go through the whole skeleton and find a bunch of bones/slots in order to activate and work on them.
This is getting very tiring for the animators(and for me if i need to do a fix). I know Spine is what it is right now, but why not make it scalable to more complex projects by adding some "simple" organisational features ? 🙂
Note : we have no issue at runtime, this is only about editor workflow.
Also, is it to be considered to "open" Spine in order to let developers write their Editor tools ?
With this, I wouldn't even bother you with new features, we'd just write our own tagging system.
Thanks,
ben