Hello, I was working in spriter for some time and I was wondering if you have any advice on how to make the switch less painful. Spriter had a laundry list of bugs and flaws, but it was really easy to setup bones and animating was very quick and simple. Now I'm trying to figure out Spine and it feels like at every step I have to check or uncheck something before I can do anything. The first thing I did was to setup hotkeys but they don't really help much. It's like the whole workflow is rigged with roadblocks.
I struggle to figure out how the dopesheet works and why is it organised this way. I don't understand why does it have separate timelines for translate, rotation, etc, instead having just a single animaton line, like spriter or flash. Is there any benefit to it? I cannot for the life of me imagine a scenario where splitting the timeline like this would help in any way. It feels like a massive distraction and a waste of time. And it cloggs the dopesheet with dozens of timelines as if there weren't enough of them already.
I also have a hard time with the keyframes when I want to make a looping animation. In Spriter, I could just click anywhere in the timeline and just move stuff around and it would all be automatically keyed and animated and properly looped. Here, I have to go out of my way to ensure that it has keyframes at the start and at the end.... but I cannot key the last frames until I make a change to it. And once I make a change it will not loop properly, so I have to copy the content from first frame and paste to the last... After working with spriter it all seems like such an unnecessary busywork, since I'm used to it being so simple and automatic. And since I know from experience, that it can be simple and automatic, I have to ask, why is it so convoluted here?
Then there are seperate buttons for moving stuff around, rotating, resizing... Okay, In theory it seems like a good idea to separate those actions so you don't accidentally rotate, when you want to move, but in practice it's even worse, because I have to keep switching between those tools every second and I constantly push the wrong hotkeys, because there are so much of them I have to keep track of... And as a result almost every time I want to move stuff, I rotate it, and when I want to rotate it, I move it around... The interface is so counter intuitive. The rectangle eight point style transform tool would be much better here. Most people are familiar with it because many other programs use something like it. And there is a good reason why so many programs use it. Because it's the simpliest, most intuitive and efficient tool for moving stuff around, rotating, resizing, deforming and on top of that - it's the best tool that allows you to seamlessly switch between all of those actions in no time. Why in the name of everything that is good in the world, would you go out of your way to fix one thing that was never broken and replace it with something inferior?
Those are my problems regarding coming to Spine from spriter. I'm sure many of those problems would be resolved If only I could understand what made them to be this way and how it will benefit my work in the long run. But since I could not find proper justification for those design decisions, I am left dazed and confused. I really want to like this software, but I could really use some help.