Hello guys,

My name is Juan, I've been working with spine for a while now and I'm currently making a false lo-resolution 8-bit esque game using Spine with a friend. While making extremely lo resolution animations with Spine I found out a great idea to solve some problems, so If your interested in getting better keep reading:

Our problem is that when we are using character designs with outlines our images seem to break and lines seem to overlap very often, specially when we are doing extreme bends in our articulations. In a similar way this happens in 3D and there are some rigging techniques to minimize de damage. In Spine we can do this too since it allows to attach several slots to a single bone with different draw orders.

Here's the object we want to bend:

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I've used thick black lines because the are easier to show, but I would not recommend to use black lanes and you can adjust the thickness to your liking. The thinner the lines, the more difficult the process though.
If we don't do anything and just cut a couple of pieces we could get problems like this one when we bend too much:

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So what we have to do its actually separate the outlines from the colours and put the outlines behind all the color slots. So we will have like two models using the same bones, one for the outlines and one for the colours. We can also add some lines to the colour parts that we want to be on top when our colour parts overlap. Here's an example with the technique applied:

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No Images were change in that movement. Also note that there are some graphical mistakes in the joints because It was a fast design and It's the first time I actually try this technique in an HD drawing.

In order to achieve that result I also added a bone in the knee and it is a separate object. This allows me to adjust the joint very easily as I want, as If you had an armor piece joinning both bones, wich always makes things easier.

If you want to check out the project to see what images and bones I did use, download the attachment.

Well that's all guys, I hope it is useful to anyone of you. This is an amazing piece of software and I wanted to add a little contribution so It goes bigger every day, thanks a lot Nate and Shiu for your extremely good work.