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Zelda-Like Adventure Animating
Hello Everyone,
I just wanted to pop in and seek out some advice. I'm currently developing a Zelda like adventure game in unity and ive unfortunately had to hire new coder(s) for the project. Were still in the early stages but we are discussing spine animations. As you would expect in a Zelda-like adventure the player is able to face in 4 different directions. Ive currently got it set up so each direction is its own separate spine file. Now keep in mind that these animations are all pretty complex (hair bouncing, meshes, various types of equipment to equip ect) not to mention ive got at least 80-100 or so animations for each angle and its going to continue to grow. With my previous coder we just use 3 different files for the other angles and everything seemed fine.
The new coder is asking me to have all of the angles in one file. Now to be honest im pretty worried about about all the stuff this will break not to mention how much more complicated things will become by adding that much more animations to one file. Although it will simplify some things im fairly confident its going to complicate things even more.
I just wanted to know what is the best way to go about doing this? 3 different files or should I bring in all the skeletons into one file? I cannot even fathom setting up skins for each direction. He mentioned in one of his previous projects they used 1 skeleton and just had skins for multiple directions. I imagine this was a bit of a head ache to set up for the animator but to be fair I think they had maybe 10 animations for the whole game so it wasnt so bad.
Thoughts?
i'd keep the skeletons in separate files. I'm not quite sure what his concern is, the skins of each skeleton can be combined into a single atlas for better performance.
Having separate skeletons per direction is a good idea for complex skeletons, since different bones may be needed. Skeletons are always exported to separate data files but you can use New Skeleton or Import Project to have multiple skeletons in a single Spine project. This can make it easier to switch between skeletons. If that is what he is asking, it's reasonable, but it's mostly for the animator than the coder. It does make exporting easier, since export of one project will export all your skeletons.
I worked on a Pac-Man-like game based on the Strawberry Shortcake characters. 4 directions all in one Spine file and skins for 5 characters. Not many animations between all the characters though but it wouldn't be hard to add more without crying(much).
The way we had it set up was to have a North bone that would become the "root" of the North facing character with a skeleton for the North facing animations built off of that. Then, of course, the same setup for each other direction. This way in Setup we could pull the North's "root" bone away from the others and see only the North facing bones and images when animating. Then when all the North animations were completed we just return the North's "root" back to center.
Animations were organised by direction so N-AnimName, and S-AnimName, etc. Because of the skeleton tree was organised with a single bone as a root for each direction setting the other directions views to invisible when a North facing animation was playing was pretty simple.
I don't know if any of that would help but in the end the skeleton looked like a godawful nightmare when everything was centered, but digging into it it's not that bad.
Good luck!
24andahalf ha scrittoThe way we had it set up was to have a North bone that would become the "root" of the North facing character with a skeleton for the North facing animations built off of that. Then, of course, the same setup for each other direction. This way in Setup we could pull the North's "root" bone away from the others and see only the North facing bones and images when animating. Then when all the North animations were completed we just return the North's "root" back to center.
Animations were organised by direction so N-AnimName, and S-AnimName, etc. Because of the skeleton tree was organised with a single bone as a root for each direction setting the other directions views to invisible when a North facing animation was playing was pretty simple.
That's actually pretty smart and useful! Thank you for sharing 