Currently, I do my art in my program of choice, and save it such a way I can open it up in GIMP. Once in GIMP, someone built a handy plugin that breaks the layers down into individual pngs and exports the JSON so you can just BAM!! bring that right into Spine. And this is great! It speeds things up immensely, because everything stays exactly where I positioned it, which can take so much time by hand. All I have to do is add bones, which is super easy with shortcuts.

There's just one problem... what if I want to add more art assets on top of that? I think my only two choices are:

A) Do it by hand. Save each new png I want to attach into the folder, then add it to the skeleton manually in the editor. (This is fine if you're only adding two or three new things that were forgotten, but after being on a project where asked to add in several things a day for several days straight... re-positioning everything to pixel perfect precision just makes me cry.)

B) Re-export ALL of the art assets and re-import ALL of them into Spine, starting all over again with new bones and animations. (This is an acceptable solution if you're not very far along and don't mind losing all the time you've spent so far in Spine. Boning may not take long, but as soon as there are animations this is simply not an option.)

C) Create a JSON file of the project as it is now in Spine, create a JSON file for just my new art assets by exporting from the art program, and open them both up in text editors and manually move things over. (And hope things don't scream when trying to import the frankenstein creation.)

All of these are incredibly time consuming options. I'd love to just mass add my new art (under the default bone) by importing another JSON file. Surprise! Selecting that from the menu on an open project prompts you to create a new file or create a new skeleton. And while skeleton merging tools existed for past versions of Spine, they don't play well today, especially not when things are already animated. This isn't even worth listing as a viable option. (But it might be? If done by hand... However, once again, frakenstein JSON isn't something I feel comfortable with creating.)

This tedium is leading me to stall during my art creation phasing because I want to make sure I have everything I need before I bring it into Spine, else, it just takes forever to add it. I just wish I had an option to merge in new art assets the same way I imported them in the first place - from a JSON file. Just append new assets to the root bone, but positioned at the coordinates they're meant to be at already! I'll gladly figure the rest out from there myself.

What are we currently supposed to be doing? Is there some kind of workflow lifehack I'm missing here? Is it best to just 'get good' at manually fusing those JSON files in a text editor?