Mesh animation AND skins possible?

BenRadish

Hey guys!
We want to use Spine for a work-for-hire project, the goal is to animate little aliens (via bones AND meshes) and re-use the animations with skins.
I'm not able to make this happen because the mesh I create for one bone with a skin placeholder doesn't seem to work other skins.
Is there a way to achieve this?

Thanks and cheers!

Oh, the exported json has to work in Unity3D 🙂

BinaryCats

its not particularly supported. sadly.

but there is a workout:
Duplicating Skin with mesh animations intact

Søren

Free-Form Deformation (FFD) is not transferred between different skins since it's done on the actual attachment and not the placeholder.
Even duplicating a skin won't make the FFD animation transfer to the new skin.

Nate is working on something that might make this possible but I don't have all the details yet.

Edit: Great link in the previous post 🙂

BenRadish

Thanks guys!
Well, that's sad... The workaround from the link doesn't work for us either, we want every alien in one skeleton.

Anyways, looking forward to the day both things combined will be possible 🙂 For now, I'll just go back to bone animation.
Have a fine weekend, you two!

Pharan

You could always use mesh Weights for now. Weights animations can be shared between duplicates because they only need to rely on the bones' movements.

BinaryCats

I thought the above was putting it onto one skeleton? hmm maybe I miss read ? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ you too

and, although I say this on almost every topic, even if it is two skeletons you can use skeleton merger tool to merge them

😐

Pharan

What?

BenRadish

Hmm, I haven't worked with weights yet - I'll check them out, thanks!

Have to say that I'm a bit of a noob regarding meshes and skins: BinaryCats (cool nickname btw), will your skeleton merger tool make one skeleton with mesh animations AND several skins (about 30, to be precise 😃 )?

Also, I re-read the "Duplicatin skin"-post and now I understand it more clearly.
It would be possible to do but only if all the animations are already in place - the copying of skins is the last step, so to say. For game development, it's quite a limitation... it would be best to be able to change little details about animations up until the very end of development.

24andahalf

About 6 months ago I was on a project with 20 characters and a metric butt-ton of animations per character. Originally we were gonna go with skins on one skeleton but the characters were too different(extra limbs, different number of eyes, etc). Our original tests were all based on mesh weighting with skins and we were adding new characters mid test for fun to see what would happen. I'd say mesh weighting is definitely worth checking out.

BenRadish

Nice, thanks! I have a very similar case here, with the added bonus that the characters are really similar (= all limbs and body part graphics even have the same pixel size and all).
Mesh weights seem like the way to go 🙂

Sooo, I just read the news about the new feature, linked meshes!
It seems like that's exactly what I was looking for, right? I don't have a clue how to use it yet, though 😃 Also, it seems like the Unity runtime has still to be updated to be able to import this feature, is that true?