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  • Mesh Bug and Feature Requests

So there's a bug involved with the ability to key meshes (now including clipping masks) that I wanted to bring to your attention. I also figured while I was here I'd make a few feature requests that I've been mulling over. I posted about this bug ages ago and never brought it back up because I was stuck in 3.8 for a while until 4.1 got curves (I emailed Nate back about that but not sure if you got it - great job on that in the event you never saw my response, and thanks for emailing me about it! Also cheers for being the best damned dev team 😃). I figured with how many changes happened in the upgrade to 4.0 that this would either get fixed or the underlying structure causing it may have gotten changed so much that it didn't exist, but it seems to have gotten worse lol. so here goes:

BUG: Invisible Mesh Key
Occasionally the key icon on the Tree view that allows you to manually key a mesh will not be visible (similar to how it looks when the mesh is set to off, or how a non meshed attachment looks inside of a slot). The solution to this has always been to move a vertex on the mesh, ctrl+z to undo, and that would make the key icon reappear. Alternatively you could turn on auto-key, or if you noticed it before making changes could simply flip the mesh on/off. It was a pain in the ass but nothing too awful. In 4.1 now this issue appears to have extended to clipping masks as well. However, there is NO WAY to make the key icon on clipping masks appear. The only work around for this is turning on auto-keying. So I mean, again not the WORST thing ever, I can work around it, but since I don't really use auto-key too often I do run the risk of accidentally leaving it on afterwards, and its just somewhat awkward. If it's any help my file sizes are on the large side (no single element exceeds 4096 in any direction, but some do push this).

FEATURE REQUEST: Pack Settings bool to separate skins to their own texture sheets.
So I have some skins for animations in my game that use like 90% of the base skin of a character, but the added items take up a large amount of space and add multiple textures. They also are used infrequently enough that I don't need to be able to actively call them whenever. I've taken to exporting both as completely separate skeletons which makes for a bit of an obnoxious pipeline (and it means that we basically double up on that 90% of the texture that's used in both). If these alternate skin elements were isolated to their own texture(s) rather than being mixed in with every other element of the base skin texture sheets it would allow the different skeleton exports to share textures in the worst case or just allow me to run one skeleton in the best case (I actually have no idea if a texture sheet is never called if it's the same as if the sheet never existed in terms of the weight of the skeleton - would love some info on this). As mentioned above in the bug my files are on the large side, so if you'd like some examples of where this issue pops up I can post some export examples.

FEATURE REQUEST: Saved Selection Groups (or just more organization tools in general)
I would like a way to save a set of bones/meshes/slots/whatever so I can easily grab it again whenever. This would help a lot with any time I need to reuse more specific elements from an animation, or just want to edit certain areas quickly. Really any and all organization tools are always a great benefit! (Saw someone else ask for something similar in the animation editor in another thread, I'm all for that as well). Would be great if these type of organization tools could be stored as simple buttons we could click inside of a folder, similar to how events/constraints/skins are stored currently (just w/ different functionality obviously).

FEATURE REQUEST(maybe??): Changing Parent Bone AFTER Animations while retaining world pos of children
So I'm sure this isn't a bug, and I'm curious also if maybe I'm just doing something wrong and if there's already a way to do this (hence maybe not a feature request either). Currently though if I want to add a new parent bone to bones that have already been keyed in animations, it moves the child bones to new locations from the ones they were originally keyed on. What I'm curious about is if there is a way to add parents after the fact while keeping the world position of the original bones (where as currently it appears to treat their keys as local or parent associated). I understand the bones are all inheriting a lot (like if there's rotation suddenly from the new parent) but my use case is basically just acting like a new center pivot for the children bones, but the subsequent results are so different per bone that I feel I'm just not understanding something.

Related Discussions
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Thank you for the bug report and suggestions!

Regarding the bug, there is a known bug with the mesh key buttons in 4.1 and I guess the same one you have found:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/718
Could you please try to enable Show all skin attachments and see if you can work around that bug?

FEATURE REQUEST: Pack Settings bool to separate skins to their own texture sheets.

This sounds like a good idea, so I created a new issue ticket on GitHub:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/720
As I wrote in that issue, the atlas texture pages can be packed based on the structure of the images folder. If you would like, please send us your Spine project via email and we can advise you how to modify the folder structure: contact@esotericsoftware.com

FEATURE REQUEST: Saved Selection Groups (or just more organization tools in general)

Actually, we have a similar idea on our roadmap:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/409

Would be great if these type of organization tools could be stored as simple buttons we could click inside of a folder, similar to how events/constraints/skins are stored currently (just w/ different functionality obviously).

I’m afraid I could not understand how you wanted it to be implemented exactly. If you don't mind, please add your comment to the issue above so that we can know the details of what you want.

FEATURE REQUEST(maybe??): Changing Parent Bone AFTER Animations while retaining world pos of children

Currently though if I want to add a new parent bone to bones that have already been keyed in animations, it moves the child bones to new locations from the ones they were originally keyed on.

Hmmm, I can understand if you mean by "it moves the child bones to new locations" that the child bone's translate X and Y values are changed when the Parent or Local axis is selected, but the the position on the World axis will not be changed just by adding a new parent bone. Could you describe the steps you have tried?

Hey Misaki! Thanks for the quick reply 😃

Show All Skin Attachments does indeed turn it back on, but obviously just another work around similar to the auto-key option since it comes with caveats (ie: I don't actually want to see all those skin attachments all the time 😛). I forgot to mention it before also, but the clipping mask layer is inside of a skin placeholder, so that is likely the reason it is fully refusing to show up.

In regards to the pack settings I'm not in a huge rush to fix this so I'm fine with just waiting for it as a future feature! Thanks so much for making a ticket for it 😃

Also great to hear there are selection groups planned. My idea there you wanted more info on was more just an idea for you to avoid making a complete new UI for it, but the ticket shows the more robust custom window you've already made. Looks great to me 😃 excited to see it implemented in the future!

For the bone parenting issue:
So basically the example I have is I want to add a center bone to the face to add some minor side to side movements. My face features are separated so animations can run independent of everything else. For certain poses those have already been moved to different locations via animation keys, so that for instance on a head that faces more upward, the eyes and mouth and nose needed to change and move to slightly different locations. When moving the bones that are keyed into this new face center bone it has some unexpected movements. I'm just wondering if this can be done in such a way that I can add the parent with the child bone keys staying where they are from a world view perspective (each bone seems to move in different ways from eachother also, so it seems like it might be local movement based?? again just kinda confused by the behaviour). I've attached some images to help illustrate how the keys look before and after the parenting (the parent bone in question is the pink bone in the center of the head)
Before Parenting:

After Parenting:

Show All Skin Attachments does indeed turn it back on, but obviously just another work around similar to the auto-key option since it comes with caveats (ie: I don't actually want to see all those skin attachments all the time 😛). I forgot to mention it before also, but the clipping mask layer is inside of a skin placeholder, so that is likely the reason it is fully refusing to show up.

Thank you for trying! Of course it is not our intention to force users to use a particular option, so we would like to fix this bug as soon as possible.

Regarding the bone parenting issue, thank you for elaborating it! However, it is difficult to determine the cause without seeing the actual skeleton, so could you please send us a minimal Spine project for head portion only via email?: contact@esotericsoftware.com

Guys indeed there was another bug with not seeing mesh key buttons before even 4.1. and the new bug is much stable hard to fix 😃

2 meses depois

The bug registered as issue #718 has been fixed in v4.1.18 and it has been released. Please update and check if the issue is solved!