Workflow help request - Animation with many similar objects

Macamagucha

Hi!
I'm wondering if there's a better way of doing something that annoys me a bit.
Sometimes when I'm animating a whole scene in Spine I need to add a lot of similar things that are scattered all over the place. Sweat is a perfect example for this - nothing complicated:

Two/three bones for a drop of sweat
Slot with meshed drop of sweat (bound to the bones above)
Path with bones constrained to it

Animation is nothing fancy too

Bones scale from 0 to 100, ride down the path, disappear by the end with Alpha going to 0 and repeat

This is super easy stuff. But then I want to add 50 of it, and every drop of sweat is offset by a different amount to make it look realistic, and dropsheet becomes pretty hard to manage.

What would be your tips for managing cases like that?

Misaki

Macamagucha The method proposed by Spinebot, which involves creating a template and duplicating it, is not a bad idea, but based on the screenshot you showed us, it appears that some bones are scaling at exactly the same time, so it might be better to use transform constraints.
Even if the scale values are not uniform, you can adjust how much each bone is affected by the transform constraint by changing the mix value.

However, transform constraints cannot affect slot colors, so with this method, you will still need to add the slot color animation manually. In this situation, the new Sliders feature added in 4.3-beta is useful. This feature allows you to create a separate animation that serves as a template and reuse that animation in other animations. Unfortunately, we have not yet created a user guide for the new features of 4.3-beta, but if you are interested, please inspect the following thread for reference:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/28396-the-spine-43-beta-has-begun

Spinebot

To manage animations with many similar objects like drops of sweat in Spine, you can consider using a combination of techniques to streamline your workflow. One approach is to create a template for the sweat drop, including the bones, slot, mesh, and path, and then duplicate this template for each instance you need. You can use the "Duplicate" function in Spine to quickly create multiple copies of your template. After duplicating, you can adjust the timing and offsets for each instance to achieve the desired randomness and realism.

Macamagucha

Misaki Thank you for the reply! Unfortunately, I'm working with GMS so I have to stick to 4.0 🥲 But I can't find anything related to the "folders" and grouping related items suggested by Spinebot. What does it mean by that?

Erika

Macamagucha Spinebot made that up, you can use folders only in the tree view!
I second the suggestion of first animating a sweat drop, then duplicating it with its keys to speed up the process. Usually at that point I also would adjust the position of the bones and move the keys on the timeline to make the start/end times more random.