Welcome to Spine!

Slots (and skin placeholders) add an extra level to setup, but make for sane project organization and runtimes and are key to bone independent character draw order. If you move a slot to a new bone, the draw order is not affected. If you move an attachment out of a slot to a new slot on a bone, then you're right it goes to the top of the draw order. I've changed this in 1.8.13 (will release tomorrow) so the new slot goes next to the slot the attachment is moving from.

You can do as you described, select multiple images, drag them into the editor area all at once, arrange the images and set the slot Z order, then draw the bones and assign them to bones. Just be sure to move the slot containing the image to the bones and your Z order should not be affected. I guess you are moving the images, so you leave empty slots and have to create a new slot for every move.

Some useful tips:

• Use the +/- keys on your keyboard to change the draw order of the selected images. Hold shift to jump by 5. You can do this with images selected in the tree or in the editor area.

• With the Create tool, while dragging a new bone press shift (you don't have to hold it) to highlight the image under the mouse. When you release the mouse to finish the bone, the highlighted image (actually its parent slot) will be moved under the new bone in the tree. This way you can draw bones on top of your character AND move the slots under the bone in one fast step. This won't mess up the draw order either, since it just changes the slot parent.

Now your workflow is: drag images in, arrange them, adjust draw order with +/-, draw bones with shift. This should be pretty efficient.

The Brash Monkey guys use different technologies and have a pretty different approach to animation, so collaboration would be difficult. Also, two Kickstarters are more than enough for us, it's a stressful process!

If you haven't already, I suggest watching this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS-8i6E4Ocg I go trough a pretty quick way to set up skeletons.

Setting up a complex skeleton in Spine can be a bit painful and counter intuitive at first, but once you've gotten used to that as Nate said you'll see that it is not slower than Spriter and Spine animation workflow is (in my opinion of course) much better than Spriter, although it is also more dificult to learn since you have to get used to the fact that each bone doesn't have one possible keyframe, but one for each type of movement which is a feature you'll end up loving if you like to fine tune your animations.

The way meshes work in Spine is also pretty neat and it lets you control every vertex you want to add allowing you to be as efficient as you want or as fast as you want (just as with the rest of your animation) and the near future Spine will have IKpining and skinning too.

I believe Nate also did some experiments on attatching a whole Skeleton to a slot, which is also something very interesting.

So in my humble opinion, Spine is indeed much more difficult to use than Spriter, but those difficulties add actually great tools once you've gotten used to them, don't let first impressions let you down.

Pharan ha scritto

@Nate: maybe it'd be better like this?
If you try to reparent an image to a bone, and the image is the only image under its slot, the whole image+slot should move to the bone and not prompt you to create a new slot.

Maybe, but I'm worried there would be a time you wanted to move an image and leave the slot. I guess in that case you can choose a slot as the parent and it will only move the image, but if you choose a bone as the parent it will move the image's slot. I'll give it a try.

'cause there's really no easy way to select a slot in the viewport.

Or make an easy way to select a slot in the viewport...

In the tree, uncheck the button for attachments. Then when you select an image in the editor area, the slot is selected in the tree and when you set parent by pressing P (which is another good tip), it will change the parent of the slot.

Another way without changing the tree filter is to select an image, then press the "Parent" hotkey (which is ctrl + UP by default) to select the parent, which is the slot, the press P if you want to change the slot's parent.

Note the Parent hotkey previously only worked on bones but I've fixed this in 1.8.13. Edit: actually I made parent/child/next sibling/previous sibling work on any object in the tree, and I added new hotkeys for parent bone/child bone/next sibling bone/previous sibling bone which do the same but only for bones. Because I've changed the default hotkeys, this will unfortunately reset your hotkeys.

Check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Animators-Sur ... 0571202284

You could export frames from spineboy and pull them into a new project.