@Cranktrain Thanks for getting back to us, very glad to hear you've figured it out!

Cranktrain I'm a bit confused, because I've checked my git history and while I can see that I did add https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes.git?path=spine-unity/Modules/com.esotericsoftware.spine.urp-shaders#4.1 to the manifest, I still ended up with the 4.0 version remaining?

Oh dear, this does indeed sound like a nasty issue to track down, good catch and thanks very much for sharing your insights! I assume that the Unity Package Manager does not view a changed source git URL as a reason to update a package as it would when the minimum version number would change to something higher than what it already has downloaded.

@Cranktrain Sorry to see you're encountering problems! Could you perhaps create a stripped-down copy of your project that still reproduces this issue, and send it to us as a zip package to contact@esotericsoftware.com (briefly mentioning this forum thread URL so that we know the context)? Then we can have a look at what's going wrong.

Thanks @Cranktrain for answering!

@[deleted]
Please note that Spine offers even better ways for typical 8 (or 4) direction movement, which also allows for transition animations, etc. Amoung other forum threads, Erika described it in this forum posting here. There is also a twitch stream linked in the posting that shows everything in detail.

If you still want to switch skeletons, please do not switch them via changing the assigned SkeletonDataAsset and re-initializing it every time, as this would be very wasteful. Instead you should just have one additional GameObject (e.g. as child Transform of your character's main GameObject) for each direction skeleton. Then when changing directions, you disable the active direction skeleton and enable the new direction skeleton. This way everything is only initialized once.

Sorry for the late reply, I just arrived back at work from Christmas holidays.

Thanks for the reply @Cranktrain, you've perfectly summarized it.
Thanks Marek for offering help, but I'm afraid we'll need to implement major parts ourselves first before we can use your or any user's help (like testing with real world projects for example).

We are also very much looking forward to implementing it.

Hey sorry haven't checked the replies on this thread for a while!
Locally I have lighting working with normal maps perfectly now so am a little confused why its not working for you guys - let me put together an example scene based on the sprite unity example to show how I'm using everything. It should all be easy enough.
One thing to look out for is how you generate sprite normals - they need to be facing the correct directions themselves otherwise things will never work. You can in theory pack them rotated but make super sure their all generated facing the same direction. I'm using Sprite Illuminator by the TexturePackerPro guys and that seems to be pretty awesome.

@Pharan The tangents are working even for deformed meshes using my current method. Using a solver function that calculates the tangent for each vert based on the other verts it shares a triangle with and their UVs means it will always be correct. It just needs to only happen when UVs or verts actually change.

@Cranktrain huh, I guess slot coloring just changes the vert colors behind the scene? Don't know why that wouldn't work.. could be a bug with the shaders I've never used vert colors. Let me check!