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Hi, it has almost 1 year I started to work with Spine and one of the things I still miss is a good Mask Solution.
I've noticed you guys released a new feature about making directly on Unity, but I don't know if it could help to solve the problem I have to mask the Eye's Iris.

Anyway, I'd like to know if somebody has any idea to help me solve this problem.

PS.: On my character structure, I have a lot of different Eye shapes. For all of them, I am already using the solution of my image. The only problems are:

  1. On Unity the skin borders (used around the eye to stay in front of the Iris) is appearing some bad quality borders.
  2. I have a limit to move the Iris to look around.

Thank you very much,
Marllon.

You might want to look into clipping:
Clipping - Spine User Guide
However, note that you can only have one clipping region active per skeleton at a time, so this would need to include both borders around the eyes.

Better solutions would likely be to have the hair or other parts of the face being in front of the eye/iris (by moving the iris to be the backmost item in draw order). You might also want to scale the pupil horizontally when it gets closer to the side. You might also think about separating the iris from the pupil, so that the black part moves further to the side than the orange iris ring around it. As shown in this tip.

This could all help to constrain the iris to the face and not stand out too much.

Like Harald mentions, you can use clipping. I'm guessing the biggest problem with the above setup is when the iris moves to the outside of the face and is no longer covered by the face image. Using a clipping mask in the shape of the face image should work quite well.

1. On Unity the skin borders (used around the eye to stay in front of the Iris) is appearing some bad quality borders.

If this is caused due to deformation of the eye, I recommend using two images instead. One for the top eyelid and one for the bottom. It's easier to get good deformation this way.

Remember clipping can use a lot of CPU. For performance reasons when using clipping, use as few clipping attachment vertices as possible and clip as few vertices with it as possible. Eg, you probably need 4 clipping attachment vertices to cover both eyes. You could maybe use just 3 vertices, which would be even better

the size of the clipping attachment doesn't matter, only how many vertices it has. Then you need to clip just the iris and pupil for each, so you should use as few vertices for those attachments as possible, probably 4 vertices for each attachment.

Also remember you can weight the clipping attachment vertices similar to the head mesh, so if the head deforms via bones, so will the clipping attachment and you won't need to manually adjust the clipping attachment.

5 days later

Thank you so much for the tips guys.
Next weekend I will try every tip to see if I find something better than my current solution (where I have the skin border around the eye).

Initially, I remember to try use the clipping, but I gave up because I couldn't use one for each Eye. I also remember to try create just one for the 2 Eyes, but I can't remember now the why I gave up.

So I will give it another chance 😃

@Update about this...

I was investigating more about the border issue, and I ended up finding the solution when I was trying to solve the warning on Unity's Console that was asking to reexport the spine project without Premultiply Alpha.

So I was reading about it and just realized that we can use the Sprite Shader on Skeleton materials:
spine-unity Export Settings: Texture Packer Settings for spine unity

So, I am so happy with that result and will not make use of clipping in this project. 🙂

I really appreciate your help, guys.

Glad you could figure it out! Thanks for letting us know.

To avoid confusion: Premultiply Alpha textures are not supported in Linear color space (which I guess is what you are using and why you received the warning). In Linear color space you have to use the Straight alpha workflow. This means to disable Premultiply Alpha on export and enable the Straight Alpha Texture parameter at Spine shaders. Normal Unity shaders assume Straight alpha, which is why you are not seeing any black borders on the right image.

For reference, to prevent further troubles:
There is now a section on correct Straight Alpha vs Premultiplied Alpha export and import settings in the updated spine-unity documentation pages here:
spine-unity Runtime Documentation: Advanced Premultiplied vs Straight Alpha Import

It replaces the old and outdated spine-unity Export Settings: Texture Packer Settings for spine unity url above.

Wow, awesome! I liked a lot of the updated section on the documentation page, it is much clearer now.

Thank you very much for your attention, for sure it will help a lot more people.

Thanks for the feedback! We hope that the new documentation pages will hopefully provide more relevant info condensed on less space. As usual, any feedback, good or bad, is very welcome!