Spine General Workflow ?

RemDust

Hi guys, I just purchased Spine pro and even if I watched a whole bunch of videos before getting into it, I gotta say that I'm still not able to achieve good results.

What I'd like to know is : what is your usual workflow ?
It's really difficult for me to wrap my head around the different features and in which order they should be use.
The different videos are pretty much unrelated from the others and lots of them are even obsolete (as Spine is improving so quick, which is obviously cool but makes it really hard to learn properly).

So how do you guys proceed ? First simple rig, then what ? Key frame ? IK constraints first ? Creating the meshes ? Where goes the FFD in all that ? :sweat:

Well, you got it now, I would really love a simple workflow/roadmap that I can rely on to build my animations. 🙂

PS : I'm working on a 2D side scrolling adventure/action game, I will need to be able to replace/custom some gears, I guess that should influence my Spine workflow but except the use of slots and attachments I don't really know how yet...

Nate

I think rigging is most often driven by the art and what the animation needs to do. To get a feel for how you can use Spine in your project, bring in some art, animate it with the basic features (just keying bone transforms and attachment changes). Then maybe add IK to help with positioning limbs. Try some meshes and see how you can use deform keys for various effects. Bind some bones and see if you can get your effects without needing to move many individual vertices. The features are there to help you solve problems, if you find yourself bending over backwards to make use of features, maybe those features don't fit your problem.

To start, generally you bring in your art, create meshes where needed, including adding internal vertices and edges where the images need to deform, then add bones. Next you'd setup any constraints. Last you bind your meshes to bones and set weights.

FFD (which we just call mesh deform now) isn't usually used in setup mode, since usually your images are designed to look how you want them in setup mode. In animate mode you can set deform keys to make your images bend and deform. You can also manipulate vertices using weights, which is a bit better because you key a bone to affect vertices rather than manually move each vertex.

All of the videos in the Spine User Guide should be up to date. We don't have control over unofficial videos that unfortunately do become outdated.

Pharan

Yep. If you're a trained artist, you know that you should start with the big/important/foundational stuff and leave the little details for later, and test, test, test.

So it's not so much about deformation first, then rig, then whatever.
First and foremost: Make your image assets, bring it into Spine, make it work/move.
And before you start working on it for many hours, carefully list and consider what your character needs to do/how it needs to move and structure your skeleton accordingly: If you want or need IK, set it up. If you need it to aim, set that up too. If you want to use mesh deformation tricks, make you know how to make that work by testing it.

Beyond that, it shouldn't matter what order you do things in. Some of these things could even be added later, though that will require you to do some backtracking, and the more animations you've already done, the harder it may be to do. I would suppose what's most important is that you get things done.

You're right that custom gear/equips/whatever will affect your workflow.
Make sure you read about Skins in the Spine User Guide.
Skins will help make swapping out image parts easy for the programmer, and let you organize them in the editor.

SunWuKong

RemDust wrote
Hi guys, I just purchased Spine pro and even if I watched a whole bunch of videos before getting into it, I gotta say that I'm still not able to achieve good results.

What I'd like to know is : what is your usual workflow ?
It's really difficult for me to wrap my head around the different features and in which order they should be use.
The different videos are pretty much unrelated from the others and lots of them are even obsolete (as Spine is improving so quick, which is obviously cool but makes it really hard to learn properly).

Yo man! Don't know if this will help but we have been using Spine for our game nearly 2 1/2 years. We do mostly simple 2D sprite animation and everything is animated in Spine.

The way we started was thinking of Spine as a 'paper cutout' animation machine. We just brought in various images , attached them with bones and had at it.

Here's a quick example of a character rigged

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and a simple idle...

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One thing I would advise is (as mentioned above) to not go off in the weeds too early. Just stick to simple bone attachments and movement until you feel pretty comfortable. If you start dinking around with FFD, color tinting and all the other stuff you might miss some solid basics. Most of our animation is just images moved or rotated on a bone. Nothing more, nothing less. We do toss in some scaling every now and then for 'character' though.

We look at the bones as pivot points for animations for the most part. For that use we just out them in, move 'em into place and go for it. Not a whole lot more than that.

Here's a snippet from our devblog explaining a little of the process. This was taking from our Steam Store DevBlog which we do every week.

Original Steam DevLog Post

Boss Animation and animation in general

OK – so let’s talk about animations in games. First you will have to understand a few points we strive for when we do animation. They may or MAY NOT apply to your animation needs so check these out and see what you think.

Guidelines for basic cycle animations:

The first and last frames should be the same!
values for things like movement, rotation and scaling should, for the most part, ALWAYS move in a Sine wave.
Slow and even animation generally works better then quick stuff over time when doing cycles. There are exceptions but when you do a cycle you probably are doing to add flavor. Like any flavor too much of something can be overpowering! HAHAH! Like that comparison?! You’re a cook!

Let’s Jump straight to the final image of the moving tail with a little pipe thingie opening and closing to give you an idea of where we are heading. Notice the segments all move one after the other. We’re just doing an idle here so the thing isn’t flailing all over the place like a flag in a hurricane.
Loading Image

Ok Here we are – first setup image. We can see the basic setup for the boss body and his tail. We are using the program Spine (Spine: 2D skeletal animation for games) but this is applicable for any animation you are doing in any program. The thing we are going for a is a smooth up and down motion for the dino tail. Remembering this is just one part of a LOT of moving parts we can get going with basics of the animation.

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This next image will give you a quick sense of what we are shooting for when we do animations. SINE WAVES people! Basically you want to move/rotate/scale your values UP and then DOWN (or vice versa) and bring them back to start. For this guy we are doing something like:
Frame 0, value of Y = 0
Frame 16, value of Y = -1
Frame 43, value of Y = 1
Frame 67, value of Y = 0

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You see the magic there?! That is straight animation and it looks good too. Please understand the SPIRIT of what I am getting at here and not the literal values you are looking at. It’s time for the use of your IMAGINATION. Let’s IMAGINE you are an indie game developer and you have hundreds of things to animate. Well, are you going to sit down and mo-cap out a bunch of dinosaurs? Probably not. What you want is some magical way you can layout a bunch of animations to look good and pro. Again, generally speaking think of most creatures and even mechanical things in life. They move in sine waves – back and forth and reset.

For a lot of the basic animation you will likely be doing this will be some SWEET looking stuff. The things you will want to vary when you get down to individual pieces, creatures and the like will be the spacing between frames and the values of those peaks and valleys of the sine wave.

About the way I am using the term Sine Wave – this is just my shorthand for a series of animation values (rotation, scale or position) that change up and down (or down and up) over time.

Then we move to this final bit. Since there are three tail section and we want a whip like motion. All we need to is offset the animation in the rows by a few frames. We did the same kind of animation in each row and then shifted that animation over to the right for each subsequent section.

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Hope that gives you some ideas and hit me up here or in a PM if you have any questions you think I can help with.

Best,

-Tim

Nate

Good from both stuff Pharan and Tim!

Also take a look at this article:
Tips to create funny and juicy character animations with Spine basics
Everything there is done using Spine Essential, so no meshes, no IK or other constraints, just basic features and great animation. The fancy features can do amazing things, but you first need a handle on how to make things look good while they animate.

Whether you are using the basics or the fancier features, you still have to work within the tools that are available. There are many clever tricks and different approaches to solving the various issues you'll encounter. The Gamasutra article explains some of this a bit. Start with the basics and build your way up. It takes creativity but also experience with the tool and its capabilities. I think it's amazing when users come up with ways to use Spine that we never imagined!

RemDust

Hi guys, first of all a big thank you ! 🙂
Really happy to see that you answered so fast !

I'm gonna try to follow this general setup (and of course I'll be back with more questions ^^)