Animation Flag outside editor

TedNindo

Dear Esoteric team,
I hope you are doing fine. I have a quick question.
I work a lot with my spine pro license and most of my game animations are made in spine (a great product by the way). My sound-designer would like to set animation flags to trigger sound effects. But whenever he does that in unity and I reexport the json file (because I altered the animation) his flags are overwritten. Is there a possibility that the sound-designer sets the flag with the testversion or maybe with the basic version and export it (including the meshes and other pro features that were made with the pro license)?

I can't afford a pro license for just setting animation flags.

Or is there an even simpler method to fix this issue?

Thank you for your help.

TedNindo

Harald

Thanks for your kind words.

While it is known behaviour that manually placed events in SkeletonMecanim AnimationClips are not preserved, and events should therefore be placed in Spine instead of in Unity, this is admittedly not optimal. I have created an issue ticket here:
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/issues/1838

One workaround in the meantime would be to create a backup of the skeletonname_Controller.controller asset (which contains the AnimationClips and events). Then you could import your updated assets and copy the backup over the modified controller asset to restore the placed events. Note that the controller asset does not contain animation data such as bone locations, it only contains minimal placeholders to be callable by Mecanim. The actual animation data is kept in the .json or .skel.bytes asset.

TedNindo

Thank you for the feedback. I'll try out your suggestion and see if this helps smoothen out the workflow. But can you tell me, if I open a Skeleton made with the Pro version and just manipulate (add, remove, rename, move around animation flags) with the basic version of spine. Can I save it and export it with the pro version keeping all the meshes and deformations?

Søren

Opening a project saved with Pro, using Spine Essential will give you this warning dialog.

So I'm afraid that's not possible.

SaadFayyaz

spine pro liscense supports 2 mechines at a time i think

Harald

Sorry for the very long delay! This issue has just been fixed on both 4.0 and 4.1-beta branches. Now you can have both events coming from the Spine skeleton and user events manually added to the same AnimationClip in Unity via the Animation window.

Note that now any events coming from Spine have the stringParameter set to SpineEvent to more easily distinguish them. Events that don't have this string set to SpineEvent will be considered user events and will be preserved. (If you have existing assets in your project, previous Spine events that don't yet have the stringParameter set don't end up as duplicate entries as we're detecting very close events of the same name.)

New 4.0 and 4.1-beta spine-unity unitypackages are available for download here as usual:
Spine Unity Download

Thanks for reporting!