"nested" animations

gludion

hello,

I would like to animate a character divided in 3 parts: legs, body, and head.
Each part having its own animations, for example:

legs: run, stand, jump,...
body: punch, slap, armsUp, armsDown,...
head: smile, angry, happy, ...
Of course each part should be geometrically connected to the previous part: head connected to body, body connected to legs, in such a way that if the character "jumps" (animation "jump" in legs), the body and head will follow the jump and keep their own specific animation. In the game, each part will be controlled independantly by different aspects of the game (UI, game state,..)

See example here.
(for those who know flash, this was easily achieved by 3 nested MovieClips)

Is there a simple way to do that in Spine?

Optional questions:
Should the character be divided in 3 files? How to merge them using the API? If I use a "placeholder" for the body part in the leg file, will the transforms of the placeholder be applied to the actual body file?

Pharan

If you only need to have different parts do different movements (like the video), there's no need to separate them into 3 skeletons.
Spine's system allows additive animation playback.
So you can have 1 skeleton and 3 separate animations to control specific parts, one for the legs, one for the middle, one for the arms, and play them together.

If you have other reasons to separate them into different skeletons, do share.

gludion

thanks, it's awesome that there is actually nothing special to do 🙂

However it doesn't seem possible to preview additive playback in the editor. Is it?

I digged in the various github runtimes examples to find an example API call for playing an animation and hopefully use additive playback...

Is there an common API reference for all runtimes, such as:

how to play a specific animation, and how to use additive mode
how to change the playback speed of an animation
how to directly jump to a specific time - or percentage or total duration - in an animation
etc..

I guess such documentation is language-dependant, but perhaps there is a pseudo-code reference of what's actually possible...

Pharan

No, you unfortunately can't preview that in the editor yet.

"Additive mode" is the default mode for Spine's built-in AnimationState's implementation, which is basically a don't-do-anything-unless-specifically-called-to implementation.
when you call setAnimation, it should return a TrackEntry object. This TrackEntry object represents an instance of animation playback, keeping track of its state.
TrackEntry has both settable timeScale for playback speed. and time for the point in time where the animation is.

All this info is in the documentation. http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-using-runtimes

gludion

great, thank you very much! :clap: :yes:

cykaholic

My issue is that I have a character (Dragonfly) and it has beating wings.

The wings need to beat constantly even between animations
The wings are on different layers. One pair is on the bottom layer below the body and the other is between the head and the body.

So far we've had 2 different skeletons and attach them together but one of the wings look silly being on the bottom layer.

Am I able to either nest an animation inside another animation? or is the programmer able to slot a second skeleton on the right layer?

Thanks.

amcleod

Man I would LOVE the ability to be able to preview additive playback in the editor. That would be really handy for my projects.

Nate

cykaholic, you shouldn't need two skeletons for that. Put the wings in your main skeleton and create an animation for them to flap. Then don't animate the wings in any other animations. At runtime use track 0 for your main animation, and set track 1 to play the flapping animation looped.

I've added a task for previewing animation mixing and layering.
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/64

cykaholic

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a go.

JulioD

Very interesting thread, thanks for the info 🙂

cykaholic

Oh, so I found this video which seems to explain it too: