I have a question about how to setup a spine project for front and back sides. My humanoids will be wandering around an isometric (diablo style) grid. I don't need to do full on 8 way directions, I've been able to achieve a pretty good look by having two sets of artwork slightly angled to point Southeast (Front) and Northeast (Back), this is what I call my "Side" (Front/Back), and using the Spine XFlip in the runtime I get the correct "Facing" (Left/Right) ... between all those I can get movement in 8 directions that looks pretty good.

Anyway, I have a kind of hacked up skeleton that I was able to get working using draw order keying and image flipping, but I want to figure this out a bit more for real so that when I get to the stage of hiring an actual artist the tech and setup is ready for them to hit the ground running.

It seems to me that I will want to have two skeletons and two sets of artwork, a front facing one and a back facing one ... the reasons for needing two are easier to imagine if you think about a non-humanoid shape where for instance, if I had a creature which was not symmetrical such as a dragon with 1 wing on the left side (front facing wing is screen right, and back facing wing is screen left).

The Spine editor will allow me to create two skeletons, I'm just not sure if this sounds like a sane idea and how to control them. It seems that I cannot key the visibility of an entire skeleton, only a slot/attachment ... but maybe the Unity runtime would allow me to turn one on or off? I wouldn't want the runtime to be animating a bunch of bones for the invisible skeleton though, but I could probably modify the runtime to make sure that doesn't happen for performance reasons.

Another possibility might be to just have a whole different spine project and asset set, one for front and one for back, but it would be cool to have them all contained in one set of assets if possible.

Anyway, advice from a real artist on how to setup a rig to do all of this would be greatly appreciated.

I'd also like to use the skin technology to be able to setup several different humanoids using the same animations, but if there is a way a can abuse them in order to do front/back I'm open to it as long as I can also still use it for legitimate skin changes.

Thanks in advance.

Attached is a concept outline of a character for reference.

Colin