Feature Request: Animated UV co-ordinates

Xelnath

Hello,

Now that we have these awesome path constraints, I really want to use them to create an animated, cycling texture that tethers two bones together in spine. Furthermore, I'd love for the ability to have the ability to create 'chain link' style textures that grows additional links and retracts as the mesh modified by the control bone is moved in the engine.

Is this something reasonable and within the scope of what you'd do with Spine?

For context, I am trying to use Spine to create spell-effect using data input by the game engine for things like pulsing ribbons of energy that track from the source into the target.

Going further,

Being able to define the position of control bones in terms of percentage of position from A to B is what Transform constraints do - awesome!

It doesn't appear to be able to use the constraints to stretch the position of the control points of the paths. To be fair, one of the challenges is that in these kinds of scenarios, you want one coordinate plane (E.g. X) to be controlled as a % of the distance from A to B while the Y axis of the effect is controlled in dependently. My plan was to just have two sets of bones (Transform constrained A-B-C-D and a1, b1, c1, d1 that controlled the Y axis).

Thoughts welcome,

-Alex

Nate

We don't have short term plans for animating UVs. We considered it when we added meshes, but it wasn't a super common use case and isn't a small feature.

You might be able to fake it, eg move a mesh along the path one unit, then jump it back a unit so it appears to be moving continuously. You'd need to cover the start and end of the path with other images and it would stretch rather than repeat as the path is lengthened.

You can weight path vertices to bones, then use transform constraints on the bones.

Xelnath

The issue for me, Nate, is that I don't want 'cycling' - which is exactly as you've described. Rather, I want additional copies of the texture as the X axis increases.

E.g. A monster throws out a ball and chain. I want the game engine to add additional links along the path. Well, I am sure you understand the request. I guess I'll just need to look into doing it as a Unity engine plugin, like the skeleton separators.

Ideally, this would be just an X/Y texture coordinate multiplier on a slot that could be keyed to increase/decrease how many times the same UV coordinates were called on the texture...