- Edited
New User, first impressions and one question
I just bought the program, I'm familiar with many animation systems like Blender, Flash etc.
Observation 1 :
Maybe they should take advantage of the decades of development that has gone into standard interfaces? I really shouldn't have to hunt around for simple things that normally would be on the top menu bar on a Mac, probably on windows also? At least move or duplicate standard file operations to the menu bar, where they belong.
Observation/question 2:
Why, after setting up a skeletal hierarchy and attaching all my images and switching to animation mode, would a child bone by default NOT inherit anything from the parent? Isn't that the WHOLE POINT of having a skeleton? If there are other steps to make that work, could someone tell me? I'm curious why that would be, though....
I can see that if I keyframe a bone, suddenly the children will inherit, but that doesn't seem to be standard practice in other animation systems? Inheritance should work regardless, I would think?
Observation3 :
Naming your program "Spine" makes it a bit harder to google answers about "bones", if you think about it, since google could easily think I'm talking about human anatomy. :-)
Welcome to Spine!
Generally UIs look similar because they are built with UI toolkits that provide the same or similar components. It does not mean those components have been honed into the best solution over decades. Instead the benefit is that users are familiar with them. However, there are many poor UI designs that users are used to. The "File, Edit, View" and especially right click menus in most apps quickly become massive junk drawers. Right click "context" menus are especially unintuitive given that users can't know which objects will have a menu. I feel that UI innovation should not be stifled based on what users are used to. What is important is to provide a UI that does a job well.
Anyway, we put a lot of effort into making a nice interface with a lot of polish and details that make using it nice. While it may not be what you are used to, I hope you find it intuitive as you explore things. Also it is very fast and smooth, as Spine is built like a game and runs at high speed, unlike most desktop apps.
Bones inherit transform properties from the parent bones by default. Only if you uncheck the Inherit checkboxes do they not inherit. I'm not sure exactly what you are seeing? It sounds a bit odd. Keying a bone doesn't affect transform inheritance.
It's true the name can pull up unrelated results. Good names are hard. I suggest Googling with site:esotericsoftware.com to search only this website or just adding animation or 2D to the search. There is also a search on this forum.
Hi, Thanks for the reply.
What I'm seeing is illustrated in my screen grab. I'm in animate mode, I've rotated the leg, and as you can see the shin and foot don't move, even though it appears that they are children of the leg. As you can see in the screen grab, inheritance is all checked and greyed out, so it looks like I couldn't uncheck it even if I wanted to.
I manages to get it working in the graph, not sure why or how, I think it had to do with adding keyframes. Thanks for the advice.
Ah, you have bone and attachment compensation enabled. That's the Bones and Images buttons. The buttons flash when compensation is applied, but it's still a bit of a gotcha to accidentally leave them enabled.
Tools - Spine User Guide: Compensation