Spine 3.8 released - mesh tracing, polygon packing, and more

Mario

We are happy to announce the release of Spine 3.8! It's packed with new features and improvements that will greatly enhance your workflows!

Check out our 3.8 release blog post for more details.

Please note: You will need to export your projects with Spine 3.8 in order to use the 3.8 runtimes.

Krblshna

Omg, awesome work!

hwadock

i love it

nicmar

Great job guys!! Even easier now to create a multitude of people using only one spine asset. Looking forward to try it once my vacations over 🙂

skarasuko

I can feel it.. This Mesh Tracing is gonna be a godsend for my production time.

foriero

Thank you Nate and whole team. :-) Amazing features. :-)

Have a question though. Can that new skin feature be used for character that has like 34, front, side poses? I mean have like one skeleton and three pose skins that will have completely different bones and attachments? If yes then we are one step closer to really nice like Peppa Pig or Ben and Holy episodes production workflows. Thank you, Marek.

cyb3r

So no curve editor this time? You guys were so focused on it. What happened?

Nate

foriero wrote
Can that new skin feature be used for character that has like 34, front, side poses? I mean have like one skeleton and three pose skins that will have completely different bones and attachments?

Yes, it can be used like that. You can use it just a little, to have bones for skins where skins are "items" (eg a shirt made up of 3 attachments). You can also go nuts with it, essentially having multiple skeletons in a single skeleton by having many bones in each skin.

cyb3r wrote
So no curve editor this time? You guys were so focused on it. What happened?

Sorry! This is killing me inside. There were so many low hanging fruit features that greatly improve workflows and general quality of life. Individually they are small and it makes sense to get them done because people are suffering. Together they are a significant effort that distracts from the larger effort curve editor features. We are working on the curve editor though and it will happen. 3.8 puts us in a good place and releasing the curve editor next makes sense.

puzzler

Is it possible to load on SDK side json from 3.6 with latest SDK for 3.8?

Fabiano

This is a great update, a lot of super useful stuff, and the cherry on top of everything is that the UI keeps getting better and better, this is really a software for artists. I simply love Spine. :heart:

I don't know where and how but I received a notification in my Windows that was telling something about a new logo for Spine, is that a thing?

Nate

puzzler wrote
Is it possible to load on SDK side json from 3.6 with latest SDK for 3.8?

I'm not sure what you mean? If you write some code you can load anything. However, it's likely easier to export from the version of Spine that matches your runtimes.

Fabiano il Flaco wrote
I don't know where and how but I received a notification in my Windows that was telling something about a new logo for Spine, is that a thing?

Nope, that's not a thing! Maybe you have a screenshot?

lunchlady180

After downloading the update and exporting animation changes to our characters, my programmer says Unity is now rejecting the exports. He says the image files are there but it is not properly referencing them, so in short all of the characters and animations are not functioning. Any idea why this would be and is there an easy fix? Thanks

Erika

Hello lunchlady180, did you also re-export your characters with Spine v3.8 as required to match the new runtime update?
Editor exports and runtime versions should always match.

If you have many characters, you can automate the update of the exports using Spine via Command Line: Export - Spine User Guide: Command line

skarasuko

I am having a compatibility issue with 3.8 .json files, on GameMaker Studio 2. My programmer states that there is a console error; the engine does not recognize the Spine file. We have been using 3.7 .json files. Is there a solution to this or do we need to wait for YoYo Games to update compatibility?

Error is as followed:

Unable to cast object of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List1[System.Object]' to type 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary2[System.String,System.Object]'.

It's a mistake I personally made, but so far I really appreciate the changes in 3.8.

Nate

YoYo Games will need to update GMS2 with the 3.8 runtimes before you can use 3.8 exports in GMS2.

Fabiano

Nate wrote
Fabiano il Flaco wrote
I don't know where and how but I received a notification in my Windows that was telling something about a new logo for Spine, is that a thing?

Nope, that's not a thing! Maybe you have a screenshot?

Ah it was a YouTube notification. Maybe the title of the video changed later.

I hope that, if you're ever going to change the logo, you're going to change its font 😃

kgambill

I'm unsure if this is the correct place to report this, please direct me elsewhere if there is a better place.

There seems to be an error in the spine-csharp project with this update. I just pulled down the code from GitHub - EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes: 2D skeletal animation runtimes for Spine. in order to update from 3.7 to latest. We are building from source, and after updating I ran into an error in Skin.cs because it did not know what Spine.Collections was. After poking at it for a moment, I noticed there is no reference to OrderedDictionary.cs where this is defined in the spine-csharp csproj file.

I was able to fix it easily enough by simply including Collections/OrderedDictionary.cs into the project. However wanted to make sure people were aware of it.

Error aside, this updates looks great! Thanks to the dev team for all their continued work!

Just noticed there was a bug forum. I'll put the error there. Ignore me!

utkiupe

being able to create characters with different body type (tall, fat, etc.) in a single spine is so cool!
can't wait to test it!
I also wonder what's that secret feature for v3.9 :think:
My wish (because we have developed our own solution for that in our studio and we are not really happy about it) would be something to manage multiple animations at the same time (like playing an animation on the legs while having another one on the arms) directly in the editor.
anyway thanks guys 🙂

OzAdi

Thank you for the new release! Great to see the Soft IK feature finally in 🙂
I was wondering if among the ghosting changes you implemented ghosting for bones, so it is easier to check the curves of an animation as we discussed in this thread:
Motion Trail