1) You list many things you say are annoying, but I'm afraid this is not helpful. Why would ctrl+arrow be any less annoying than drag and drop?

2) Everything you want to animate is a bone. This is how skeletal animation works. We chose to not hide the fact that bones are used because this makes many things more flexible. Note you can change which images are shown on a bone.

3) Because the orange diamonds in the timeline are where you scrub the timeline. We could allow them to be dragged with a modifier key, probably ctrl.

4) We have this, hover over any button and wait. Press F1 if you don't want to wait.

5) Documentation will be coming.

Being direct is fine. We have no problem with feedback. Saying something is "annoying" is terribly non-descriptive. Instead explain exactly what is suboptimal and why.

My biggest grip with the editor is what Pharan says: when you want to create a new character, asigning the images for the slots is painful. I have to scroll down and up a lot.

I think this will be resolved until the task for quick-select an image for slots is done (I think is one of the Kickstarter goals) and setteable draw order, because being static and repeating slots with same images but different draw order is one of the things that needs to be better.

Other than that, I love the bones / slots / skin scheme of Spine. Everything is coming up nicely.

I cannot say too much as I am not using spine for now until I finish my current project.
But to setup a character is not the most creative and funny part of the animation process,
and some script can really help the process,
A script that will create the bones and link the image to it automaticaly (optimaly directly from the hierarchy of the psd files ) would defenitively help the process,
we could then freely adjust the pivot point and finetune the rig (this of course need to be done by the animator himself)
Maybe the script you have done to export the psd files and create a .json could use a naming convention to create the rig ? like we create in photoshop a layer root, spine1, spine2, armA1, armA2,hand, tail, legA1, legA2, legB1,
or watever that could tell what kind of body part it is and then interpret how does the hierarchy works ...

It is surely not an easy job to do that, but anything that will make the setup process easier will make us animator happier

By the way, thanks for creating spine !

Or maybe just import the image in spine without hierarchy, and then use a "link button", to link a child image the the parent, once the hierarchy have been edited you click the "create bones button" et voila the bones are created containing the image in their slot, just need to adjust the pivot.

We're gonna have a talk about it this weekend and see if we can come up with something to make the process easier. If it is something we can do relatively simple we can probably get it done quick, if not it will be some time before another method will be added. But thanks for the feedback!

Nice ! Thank you

That guys for expanding on the feedback.

I think hotkeys to move up/down in the draw order makes sense so it can be done in the editor, without using the tree. Maybe numpad plus and minus and also minus/underscore and equals/plus keys. Arrows will likely be used for nudge.

There are some productivity tips that can help improve the workflow using existing features. Lack of documentation makes these unlikely to be found of course. I've collected a long list and I'll make a video showing off some esoteric features.

Pressing P is the same as "set parent" (I'll add tooltips for this). When choosing a bone, you can click a bone in the editor. When choosing a slot, you can also click a bone in the editor and it'll ask if you want to use an existing slot or create a new one. This is easier than scrolling around in the tree. So, you can click an image or bone in the editor, press P, click a bone in the editor, and you've changed the parent without using the tree at all. This always works, it isn't just for the initial setup.

Another tip to help choosing bones in the editor is to enable name tags. Then you can then click the name of a bone, you don't have to click on the bone itself.

The tree can definitely become cluttered. You can reduce this by clicking the filter buttons at the top of the tree. Eg, if you are only working with bones at the moment, hide all the slots and images. If you right click a tree node, it does expand/collapse all. This can reduce the number of click needed to navigate the tree, especially with the filters.

As Shiu mentioned, we'll see what we can do to make skeleton setup easier in the short term. Feel free to continue giving your feedback about what is awkward, tedious, unintuitive, etc. No need to apologize for your feedback or surround it with praise. We do want to hear what you feel are pain points while using Spine, it's an important part of improving things.

With regards to point (3), I would also like to be able to quickly insert/delete frames without having to actually select and move any keyframes. Flash allows this by selecting a frame and pressing F5 (add frame) or shift-F5 (remove frame).

Spine differs a bit from Flash. I guess remove frame would delete all keys at the current frame? What would add frame do? Add a key for every bone and slot at the current frame? :o If you are using Spine for PNG export, maybe this makes sense. You can currently press ctrl+L to set a key for every selected bone.

If you click add frame on a frame with keys, it shifts those keys (and all keys to the right of the current frame) one frame to the right. Remove frame would remove any keys from the current frame and then take all keys to the right of the current frame and shift them one frame to the left. You can do some quick, targeted timing changes like that.

To clarify, "add frame" would not set any new keys, it would just shift around the existing keys.

Add frame: all keys in this frame and all keys to the right of this frame will be shifted one frame to the right.

Remove frame: all keys to the right of this frame will be shifted one frame to the left and keys on this frame will be deleted.

Ah, I see, we'll consider it. FWIW, currently you can hold alt while dragging a key to also move all keys after it.

!!! [boggles] !!!

Cool! I didn't know that. That's extremely useful.

@bobo sorry if this is a short post, I'm on my phone and have a NASTY hangover after a wedding yesterday. If you need to tweak the position of your bone without moving the images, just enable image compensation, likewise you can enable bone compensation as well. This makes tweaking your pivot really quick without having to move images afterwards.

Just some suggestion: set those hot key on the LEFT side of keyboard so we can just use left hand to finish the task while right hand operating the mouse. It's going to be way more effective than what we have now. For example, parenting a image, I have to move my left hand to the right or use right hand moving it away from the mouse. Those subtle differences makes greate differences if tasking in large number.

Whew that's a lot of text. Diving in...

bobo escreveu

hey Nate! thanks for your quick response!
the only problem i found with bone creating is editing them, after i placed a bone, why cant i edit its pivot point or origin ?

As Shiu mentioned, use bone and/or image compensation to adjust a bone without affecting child bones or attached images.

-double "root" bone
while using the PS script, and loading the character, i had trouble to animate the character the keyframe buttons where disable, thought its a bug but seems like if u have double root bone by mistake, u cannot animate

You should only ever have a single root bone. How did you get more than one?

the select image "P" select bone is fine, its annoying that by default while the "rename" window pops out its not focused on the text field

The rename dialog selects all the text. The new-slot dialog and existing-or-new-slot dialogs focus the textfield. Did you mean a dialog other than these three? I've changed the new-slot dialog and existing-or-new-slot dialog to select all the text in the textfield.

delete just the bone without deleting the image

You should never need to do this, since you can edit the bone just fine.

- Ordering images [snip]
what i would suggest that if u select "order" in the tree, and then on the stage select an image, you will instantly see it "marked" or highlighted in the order.

It would be awkward to have to first select draw order then an image, just to get it to select the slot under draw order. The way to do it is this: uncheck the image and bone filters at the top of the tree so only slots are shown. Notice "draw order" is gone, this is because you can drag the slots around directly. Now when you select an image in the editor it is selected in the tree. (actually it isn't, but this is a bug I just fixed and will be in the next version :* )

a MUST HAVE feature, is binding for moving image order up or down

Agreed.

missing a "key all" stroke

It's ctrl+L, but should probably be ctrl+K. Ctrl+L keys all transforms for the selected bones. Often you don't want to do this though, as it causes your animations to be a bit robotic. You also want to use as few keys as possible, which is a little more efficient at runtime.

- editing key-frames
its a must have, not being able to select the "diamond" and change its position its really messed up for animators, please add the option, even CTRL + CLICK and then drag it around, also if i select few diamonds key-frames together, add the option that i can "stretch" them together and maintain the timing changed relatively

We could allow dragging the orange diamonds in the timeline with ctrl pressed. For now just use the dopesheet. At the top of the dopesheet is an "overview" row that shows all the keys. Moving keys in this row is identical to moving the orange diamonds.

Click and drag in the dopesheet to make a selection box. Then click and drag the selection box edges to scale the keys. You can also scale them negatively to flip.

if u have tons of parts selecting it from dopeshit is hard! u need to select from up and wait until its select all down..

I think the "overview" row in the dopesheet handles this.

i was not able to "increase" the size of the window (when i go to the upper corner, like in photoshop) when i am on the dope sheet, or even "tear off" to another screen so i could see the whole keys and work (this could be very helpful)

You can drag the "Dopesheet" button up and down to resize the dopesheet. Tearing it off to a new window would be nice but is hard to implement.

- changing body parts on the fly
while u have to add them to the bone and then "click" the little circle at the tree to have them being replace is really slow process

This feature is planned:
https://trello.com/card/slot-image-choo ... c0059d9/45

dunno how hard is it, or if its possible, but maybe add a "SKEW" option, this will make animation 10X more flexible, (like in flash).

Skew is almost free form deformation and is pretty involved. Maybe in the future.

changing keystrokes and shortcuts

Possibly a way to customize shortcuts, but not any time soon.

Thanks for all the feedback! Keep it coming. I like the small changes that improve things the most. We've promised a bunch of features in the Kickstarter, so I have to prioritize all of those before I can work on other features. If I didn't do this then the Kickstarter stuff would never get done, or would drag on and on. This means if a suggestion wasn't part of the Kickstarter and isn't something I can do quickly, unfortunately it has to be left for later.