Problem with instant animation blend in Unity

Michal_Bernat

Hi,
I have a weird problem and I cannot find a solution to it anywhere. We are using Spine animation in our project and we have a problem when we are switching to a specific animation.

https://gyazo.com/3b1158a1a364584dc9e7e95117b0c518

Notice the hard blend from "idleAttack" to "idle". Both transitions have exactly the same blending settings (no Exit Time, fixed duration to 0.25s) and yet going back to "idle" always results in this hard cut.
Any animation does the same in every single character I animated so far.

I skeleton viewer the transition looks normal. We have keyframes for all the bones included in all of the animations.

I can send you the rig to take a closer look.

We are running this on Spine 4.0

Misaki

Michal_Bernat I understand your problem from watching the video, but without looking at how the transitions are set up, I am not sure what the cause of the problem is. So I would appreciate it if you could send us a minimal Unity project that can reproduce this problem: contact@esotericsoftware.com

Spinebot

It seems like you are experiencing an issue with animation blending in Unity using Spine. Based on the information provided and similar issues discussed in the forums, here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot and potentially resolve the problem:

Check Required Additional Keys: Ensure that your animations have the required additional keys, especially at the first frame. This is crucial for smooth transitions when using SkeletonMecanim. You can find more information in the spine-unity Runtime Documentation: Required Additional Keys.
Preview in Unity: Verify if the animations play correctly in the Preview section of the Inspector window when the SkeletonDataAsset is selected. If the animations look correct in the preview, the issue might be in the implementation. If not, there might be a problem with the export from the Spine editor.
SkeletonMecanim vs. SkeletonAnimation: If you are using SkeletonMecanim, consider switching to SkeletonAnimation as it handles transitions differently and might resolve the issue. If you need to stick with SkeletonMecanim, ensure that you have the correct setup and additional keys as mentioned above.
Check Animation Settings: Double-check your animation settings in Unity, including blend durations and exit times. Ensure that they are consistent across all transitions.
Send Project for Review: If the problem persists, you can send a minimal Unity project that demonstrates the issue to Esoteric Software for further investigation. Include the Spine project and mention the forum thread URL for context.

If you need further assistance, feel free to send your rig and project files to contact@esotericsoftware.com for a closer look.

Michal_Bernat

Misaki No problem we actually managed to solve it. I'll explain our solution and maybe you could provide some context, so we could understand it better?

We changed the "Layer Blend Modes" to "First" which was found within "Skeleton Mecanim" component, but only in the Debug version of the Inspector.

Harald

Michal_Bernat We changed the "Layer Blend Modes" to "First" which was found within "Skeleton Mecanim" component, but only in the Debug version of the Inspector.

Thanks for sharing. I wonder how you managed to get this entry set to anything else than First, as the first layer is automatically always set to First. Did you switch to Debug mode before and change these values manually?

In general it's recommended to have the Mecanim Translator - Custom MixMode parameter disabled unless you know specifically that you need a certain combination.

Michal_Bernat

Harald My guess is that our programmers downloaded some weird package for Spine. It was downloaded from Unity's package manager, not form your website.

Thanks for the reply!

Harald

Michal_Bernat My guess is that our programmers downloaded some weird package for Spine. It was downloaded from Unity's package manager, not form your website.

Thanks for getting back to us. Please note that installing via the Unity Package manager is a valid option, it might still be our official package if the package manager URL is saying something similar to https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes.git?path=spine-unity/Assets/Spine#4.2 (see the official git URLs on the download page here and this installation section here).

In case you run into such an issue again in the future and can reproduce the steps how to receive this issue, please do let us know, we would be happy to fix any issues on our end of course.