• Editor
  • Request - Weight painting improvements

Hi, I've been bouncing around between various 2d skeletal animation programs lately (mainly Blender with COAtools and Unity's Anima2D plugin), and Spine is shaping up to be very effective, especially with the new curve system.

However, it has one unfortunate flaw that really slows down my workflow, the lack of a smoothing brush or being able to use the smooth function on internal verteces. Manually assigning the weights of each vertex takes a very long time when dealing with a denser mesh.

I wasn't able to find a forum post about this specific topic, so I'll ask here, are there currently any plans to improve weight painting?

Requests TLDR:

  • Allow the smooth function to affect the inner verteces of a mesh, (affecting only selected verteces, if there are any selected).
  • Add a smoothing brush type, something like the one in blender.
  • Bone weight locking, there was a github issue about this one, but I don't think anything came of it.
  • Being able to manually pick a bone's weight colour in weight painting mode, this would help with visual clarity, sometimes the bone weight colours are too similar and become hard to differentiate.[/b]

These features would really help to speed up the work process for anyone working with dense meshes that involve fine tuned deforms.

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Hello OtterKnight,
We're happy to have you join our Spine community!

We have several resources that can help you get started crafting the perfect meshes with ease:
Blog: Mesh creation tips: vertex placement
Blog: A taxonomy of meshes
Meshes - Spine User Guide
Weights - Spine User Guide
Blog: Mesh weight workflows

Specifically, one tip that could be handy for your case is to start small, with fewer vertices, weight your mesh, then add more vertices to make everything nice and smooth: Spine will automatically calculate the weights for you.

Now let's address your requests:

  • You can affect inner vertices with the smooth button if you create inner loops (the orange lines that you can create by clicking and dragging from one vertex to another in create mesh mode)

  • The Replace mode in the weights view replaces the weights of a selected bone on the vertices it paints with the weight specified in the Weight slider: this is the equivalent of averaging a weight with a brush, try it out!

  • Yes, bone weight locking is planned. We've focused our efforts on the curve editor, which was a very requested feature. We'll get to it as well!
    (I also want this feature a lot!) https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/338

  • You can't pick a specific color, but reordering bones in the weights view is possible, and this changes the color assigned to said bone. It also changes what vertex is drawn on top: Weights - Spine User Guide: Triangle order