I like how you can drag up and down on an empty space as a shortcut to increase and decrease the weight.
For a few days until I accidentally click-dragged on the viewport, I kept adjusting the weight through the slider in the Skinning Weights panel.

(note: I noticed you tried to remove cases of accidental tool-switching so I thought I might bring this up: With the Weights tool selected, and a bone and a vertex also selected, clicking and dragging on a different bone causes it to switch to the Rotate tool and rotate that bone.)

Good catch on dragging the bone causing a tool switch. Fixed! Note the slider will set an absolute weight for the selected vertices and bones, while dragging up/down in the editor area will adjust the vertices relatively. Weights remembers its selection separately, so you can toggle between Weights and Rotate/Pose to test the weights.

I solved the draw order problem with self intersecting meshes by ordering the triangles based on the bones they are affected by the most. The order the bones appear in the Skinning Weights dialog is used to control which is on top. You can drag the bones to change the order. Cheers! :beer:

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The bone colors change when you change the order, which is disorienting, but you won't be changing the order very often. The order cannot be keyed, but is at least predictable now. It's a nice feature! :rock:

I need to implement smoothing and auto weighting before we can do a proper tutorial. Sorry!

Don't listen to Shiu when he promises subdivision. :wonder: It's difficult to implement, would require meshes to use quads instead of triangles and affects the runtimes. Maybe someday though.

Edge subdivision of the explicitly-defined edges would be simpler, right? The editor already does auto-triangulation anyway.

Or not.

Subdivision creates new vertices (doubles the vertex count) that are positioned based on the original mesh's vertices. Subdividing a mesh of triangles results in "pinching". Subdividing a mesh of quads makes it smoother. This means a coarse mesh can be animated, simplifying FFD and skinning setup, then subdivision makes the mesh deformation smooth. There is less processing on the coarse mesh for applying FFD and skinning, but more processing to compute the subdivision. There is also the problem of how to create meshes that use quads rather than triangles. Maybe we could force vertices to be a uniform grid for this type of mesh. This would be ok if the mesh hull is rectangular but I imagine we'd want to support an arbitrary polygon for the mesh hull.

Ah, you were talking about a nondestructive subdivision modifier/filter thing, rather than a permanent subdivide operation.

Yeah, I see where this would be useful but difficult to implement.

Actually I don't think the difficulty in implementation differs that much from permanent to non-destructive subdivision. The cool thing with non-destructive or non-permanent subdivision is: You have less points to weigh when using skinning and less points to move around when using FFD. If you do find you need more points to move around, you can always add them. Catmull-clark subdivision (which we might use, there are some other newer algorithms that might be faster) makes all polygons quads (two triangles) so it results in very nice deformation. If you are interested in seeing how it would look, let me know and I can put up a small video of it.

oh and here's some info on it, it's surprisingly simple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2 ... on_surface

I know Esoteric is making a video eventually, but it seems like everyone knows how to get skinning working, and I can't get far at all. Can someone (maybe someone who isn't Esoteric) post a simple 5-? step process to start bending stuff with bones? I see hints in the UI for how to get to that point, but I just don't have enough information to get all the way there.

This is what I imagine the first steps are, and I may be wrong:

1. Add an image.
2. Add bones to that image.
3. Create mesh from image.
4. Manually add vertices all along the mesh so that it can bend smoothly.
5. ???

Something something about vertex weights? I can't get that far in the UI apparently. Thanks!

5. Choose Weights tool and select the mesh.
6. Click Bind and choose bones to affect mesh, click Bind again when done.
7. Select mesh vertices for which you want to change the weight.
8. Select bone(s) in Skinning Weights dialog for which you want to change the weight.
9. Click and drag up/down in the editor area to change the weight, or use the weight slider.

This worked perfectly. Thank you so much!

Eckoh, that doesn't sound right. Have you tried restarting Spine? If it still happens, can you email us the .spine file? contact@esotericsoftware.com We don't need the images.

Nate, I just emailed you a simplified file with a single image. It is a file that is having the same issue I was having with a more complex file.