The workflow in Spine (regardless of whether you use Unity) is the following:
- Draw the moveable parts of your character in Photoshop as separate layers. (or other programs)
- Use the LayersToPNG.jsx - the Photoshop script that exports layers as pngs and a Spine Skeleton Json file.
- Import the Skeleton Json into Spine using
Spine Menu > Import Data...
- Add bones, and animate your character.
- Export the atlas and Skeleton Json into your project.
I'm not sure about what you mean by "recognized by Unity just as it is".
Neither Spine nor the Spine-Unity runtime are designed to work by exporting Spine animations into Unity GameObjects and AnimationClips. This is because Unity as a different bezier system and animation system in general lacks many of the features that Spine has.
So instead, it has internal Spine.Animation objects which are used to play the animations, and Spine's own component renderer. (SkeletonRenderer and its derived classes, SkeletonAnimation and SkeletonAnimator).
Typically, you would use SkeletonAnimation to get all the standard features of Spine animations and code around the two objects it manages: a Spine.Skeleton skeletonAnimation.Skeleton
that represents the pose, and Spine.AnimationState skeletonAnimation.AnimationState
which manages and applies the animations.
SkeletonAnimator is the alternate Mecanim state machine integration component if you want to use Mecanim and it generates and uses dummy AnimationClips as handles to the internal Spine Animations in the Mecanim state machine. They can't be previewed in Edit Mode.
The documentation is undergoing some changes but you can find the basics here: https://github.com/pharan/spine-unity-docs