How to increase number of frames on the timeline?

tkogi

I imported an animation from outside Spine, but when I add it to Spine's timeline, the outside animation feels slower. That outside animation is a VFX.
My workflow was to export my character's animation from Spine to Clip Studio. In Clip Studio, the character's animation is set to 60fps and matches the same speed as in Spine's original animation. I used this as a reference to animate the VFX. Once I went back to Spine and tried to add my VFX animation to Spine's timeline, I realized that the VFX animation did not match the character's animation speed. I set the Playback to 60 fps, but even so, I couldn't adjust the VFX's frames properly, as Spine's timeline seems to limit keyframes to 30 fps. I can delete some frames from my VFX, but it won't feel smooth as the original. Is there a way to increase the keyframes to 60 fps?

Spinebot

The issue you're experiencing is related to the Timeline FPS setting in Spine. By default, Spine uses 30 FPS, but you can change this to 60 FPS so your VFX animation has the proper number of keyframes available.

Here's how to change the Timeline FPS in Spine:

Switch to Animate mode
Open the Playback view (shortcut: alt+P)
Adjust the Timeline FPS slider to 60

However, there's an important caveat: when you change the timeline FPS, the keys in your existing animations remain on the same frame numbers, but the time between frames changes — meaning your existing animations will play at a different speed. So it's best to decide on the FPS before creating animations.

If you already have animations in your project and want to change the FPS without affecting the speed of existing animations, follow these steps:

Export the project to JSON (ctrl+E)
Create a new project (ctrl+shift+N)
Set the Timeline FPS to 60 in the Playback view (alt+P in animate mode)
Import the JSON data (alt+F, D). On the import data dialog, be sure to uncheck New project so the data is imported into the current project where you've set the desired timeline FPS.

You may also want to set the default timeline FPS to 60 in the settings (F12) to avoid this issue on future new projects.

Once your project is set to 60 FPS, you'll have access to all 60 frames per second on the timeline, allowing your VFX animation to match the speed and smoothness of your original reference in Clip Studio.

tkogi

Solved! Did exactly what SpineBot said.

Nate

The timeline FPS sets how many discrete frames (ticks) you see in the dopesheet and graph. Keys automatically snap to those. The snapping is for convenience so increasing it is reasonable if you need the granularity often. If you only need it occasionally, you can hold shift while dragging a key and it won't snap to whole number frames.

tkogi

Nate Didn't knew about shift key holding. That's an incredible tip. Thank you!