... spine.... spine does have this....
http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-weights

auto subdivision would be good to have in spine, because you need A LOT of vertices to deform smoothly and moving them manually is really painful later to fix some gaps.Of course after autosubdivision i would NOT want to move these added vertices, only the ones i created with subdivision, they should be there but unable to modify because there would be a lot of them, they should just follow other verts i created myself before subdivision.
Why does it take so long to auto calculate weights on very simple default mesh with 4 points ? Its really strange and its wasting a lot of time, i have to wait until it calculates attaching one bone to such simple mesh, is there any other way to manually attach entire mesh to one bone without calculations ?
Please change default behaviour in adding weights and if we have only one bone bind to mesh then never ever calculate weights, just attach everything from mesh to this one bone, it will save people a ton of time.Because of this creating rigs takes forever and its quite irritating havin to wait to attach one bone to simplest mesh, while i can attach second bone later without having to wait at all like with binding first bone so there is clearly some bug somewhere, if i can attach next bones with 0 wait and then manually adjust their weight, thats how it should be, i would like to turn auto off completely and use it only sometimes with more complicated meshes but looks like i cant disable auto, button is greyed out.

is there any point in binding one bone to a mesh, this does the same as parenting it

you know sub-div adds a load of verts anyway right?

yes, spriter does it very well but its deformation isnt finished, in spine you need A LOT of verts to create snake or tail that bends without forming hard curvers like on Z instead of smooth curves like in S .

BinaryCats escreveu

is there any point in binding one bone to a mesh, this does the same as parenting it

Oh damn.. man, THERE IS !!!
i want to bind one bone instantly and then bind another one instantly ( because you can already do that instantly in spine if you have at least 1 bone attached to mesh) so i could avoid automatic weights calculations completely.Sometimes i bind just one bone because i know that automatic weights will be not how i want anyway and i would like to just setup weights manuyally , add multiple bones , no calculations at all and ill do the rest myself.

absolute nobody escreveu

I never said that Spine could not bend arms and legs with one image. My issue is with the workflow of the system in place. Auto weighting does not automatically mean that you can start deforming images like in the video. You have to add numerous vertices to the mesh. Then you have to alter the mesh every frame of animation to make the deformations smooth and consistent. This takes a ton of time.

A system like the joint bone tool in the video above would really help improve animation workflow.

I dont think it takes more time than other software but automatic weights is painful right now.
I dont have problems with adjusting mesh on every frame because i know how much weights i need on limbs and how much elsewhere so i do this during setup before animating, i think you just dont have workflow figured out yet.When you work on something a lot of times then you dont have to look how it will deform because you know where to create verts and how much weight bone will use.

I suspect that is what spriter is doing, only it doesn't show you the verts

Yeah and its much better way to animate a lot of things using deformation, i dont need to manually take care of each vert, i need only important ones to move and rest of them should follow and smooth out everything between main verts created by me.

Auto Weights happening automatically and taking a long time are separate from what the OP is talking about. It takes so long because it's generating a high density mesh and apply a sophisticated algorithm to determine intelligent weights. You can use it on a mesh bound to many bones and it should do a decent job. It doesn't take long on a single bone for me, about 2 seconds, mostly just to show the dialog. I'll look at making it faster though, it doesn't need to show the dialog for a single bone.

Anime Studio is doing two things. First, it generates a mesh under the covers. How many vertices it has is anyone's guess, but I'd say it has many. Second, it seems to be using a more sophisticated skinning, maybe quaternion.

You can do something similar in Spine. Probably you guys already know this, but I'll throw out this short video anyway:

Awesome that Auto Weights decided to freak out and assign one wrong vertex weight. :bang:

You can use Generate to quickly create a mesh. Creating hundreds of points may be what you want, eg if not making a mobile game. Auto Weights gives you a reasonable starting place for binding bones to the mesh. It deforms fine until you do an extreme bend. Spine uses linear blend skinning which tends to lose volume at extreme bends. However, it is very fast to compute. Spine may implement different skinning math in the future.

I still would prefere not to have auto weights because most of the time im assigning weights myself, i want manually bind multiple bones to mesh, so all pies are yellow automatically without calculating weights , it takes a lot more than 2 seconds to calculate with 1 bone and simplest quad mesh, i have to do something else and wait until it finishes.I can do it faster myself but there is no way to turn off auto weights.

On that video with hand in spine you can see how it calculated weights, there are ugly verts visible when you bend the elbow, it doesnt smooth out verts enough even if there are TONS of them like on this hand.IT should create very S-like shape instead of hard edged like this, its hard to predict if someone wants to create snake or hand but there could be something like predefined presets for hands/joints or for tails/snakes to choose from when computing weights, afterall how many different limbs we have, not that many.

Trying selecting vertices around the elbow and clicking Smooth. Click multiple times until it has spread the weights out among the selected vertices the amount you like.

That helps a bit but please let us disable auto weights and assign all verts to single bone instantly, full manual version that could be switched off/on because calculating weights is breaking my workflow timing, i like to work as fast as i can and when i see simple mesh taking so much time to calculate while i add other bones later without any calculations is a bit weird.I know its possible.