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  • [Feature Request] Pencil Test Overlay

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Here's a nice workflow for serious animation:
(1) Do pencil tests to see if a movement and the poses that comprise it are in character and look good in animation.
(2) Pose the skeleton over the frames of the pencil test. Animate by adjusting the interpolation to match the pencil test well (by also using Ghosting).
(3) Repeat 1 and 2 for every animation clip.

I feel like the prototyping step is inherently slow and more rigid to do in a skeletal animation system vs actually drawing poses. So I think the ability to draw and animate sketches right in Spine Editor in the same interface would serve as an excellent, fast and gesture-faithful animation prototyping feature. And seeing it in the same interface would make using those prototypes as a basis for actual, fully-interpolated skeletal animations really easy.

Nate/Shiu, if you deem this worthy, I imagine this wouldn't make it into Spine for months and months and months. Not that I'd complain if it didn't have it. FFD and skinning and UI stuff are important! :p

Anyway, not to distract you from the task at hand. Just something to keep in the idea pool. FFD! SKINNING! GO! YAY!

What do you think Shiu? How does it work, exactly? You get a pencil tool and you can draw in the editor area. What happens when you scrub the timeline? What other functionality does it need?

Well, It'd be an actual pencil test, I imagine. You scrub the timeline and it actually animates. It's not a grease-pencil feature like in Blender or something.

Most of the features would be similar to Flash (as much as I don't like Flash and never use it):
Make new keyframes based on the previous. Extend the exposure of a frame. Onion skin.
Different colors you can choose from do draw lines would be helpful too.
Export the animation with the pencil test, or only the pencil test, so you can know what character parts you need to draw and render out.

I feel like it'd be asking too much of Spine if it also had selection and transform tools too, in the same way you'd lasso a certain area of a layer in Photoshop and CTRL-T, rotate or scale a thing.

I also wouldn't expect the pencil test to be exported into the json+atlas. That'd be wasteful.

The second-best implementation would be the ability to quickly import image sequences of pencil tests that were exported from another program. This has some major disadvantages like not being able to see the proportions of your rig while you pencil test (making them a bit less usable for posing) and just the general slowness involved in moving back and forth between programs.

(By the way, Flash has a nice way of visually adjusting ghosting length. Spriter's UI seems to have adopted it too. They have these little handle things on the timeline next to the current-frame indicator that you can drag in and out to extend or shorten the number of ghosted frames. One for each direction.)

At this moment I think it might be a little ambitious to think about when we have FFD, Skinning and IK to do first. However a very basic version could be implemented to start with. Would need to give it a little more thought.

Oh definitely. Like I said, I imagine this is this is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, way in the future.

Pharan wrote

Well, It'd be an actual pencil test, I imagine. You scrub the timeline and it actually animates. It's not a grease-pencil feature like in Blender or something.

You're going to need to explain what it is and how it works, so we can all be sure what you are proposing. 🙂

I think Pharan is talking about something similar to traditional flipbook animation. Basically just painting simple images directly inside of Spine with only a pencil and eraser, no fancy tools. Close to what we already have, only difference is you do the sketching in Spine, and maybe simplifying having to put individual images on a bone.

Ok. And the drawing stays for all subsequent frames unless cleared and redrawn? Doesn't sound too hard, though drawing tools are a quagmire.

Ah, sorry, Nate! I thought Shiu would cover it on your end. :p

Yeah. Like a simplified MS Paint inside Spine. But with the ability to draw several images as frames and then play them back as an animation in the same Animate Mode the editor has now, visibly overlayed on your Spine skeleton.

I think a resizable pixely brush tool and eraser would serve the purpose just fine. But yeah, I understand this involves having to mix a raster drawing system thing inside Spine AND having it animatable. I also imagine it'd be better to let Spine save these sketches in a separate file or something rather than muck Spine projects with random image data. Or I dunno :p

I imagine the drawn frames would have something that looks like keys in the dopesheet so you can control when it appears or proceeds to the next whatever.

7 months later

I hadn't even thought about the images relating to the timeline, but I see how that might be valuable. All for it!

I'll just toss in the mockup here, since this seems to be the main thread on that particular topic.

I now use EpicPen software for this. Try.

Thanks for the tip, mfedorov! At least that covers the case of needing a Grease Pencil function in Windows.