After two or three hours of setting frame offsets with a whip, my hands and eyes pains. Guides have been requested since 2016. Yes, they are not always needed, and they can be replaced with thin PNGs, but these are all stubs.

I know that you are developing physics and I remember that you added a handy Favor Tool, it's all cool, but it doesn't help at all in the routine.

Most routine operations, as it was difficult to do a year ago, are so difficult to do now.

The suggestion to use the CLI looks like a mockery.

How you develop the program is up to you, but can you make the routine operations a little less painful?

This is my personal observation and maybe other people need something different. I just briefly described my impressions of the program for a year of work.

@Urr I'm curious about what kind of animations you are making to have so many problems. If you can share your project and maybe I can help with finding the easiest and fastest workflow for you. The thing with animation is that it's hard. Making convincing motion requires laser-sharp focus, and usually years of practice. When you look at the usual 3 years of bachelor's + 3 years of junior position you need around 6 years of constant work to be a decent animator. Some get it faster, some slower, but it's still years of concentrated work. We are constantly working on how to make Spine easy to use and intuitive with new features, but that is a huge challenge as there are so many use cases, plus users coming from different backgrounds with different skill sets and different necessities.

  • Urr replied to this.

    Sinisa

    What advice can you give me if I need to quickly switch between filters in Dopesheets?

    I need either non-collapsible buttons like in Tree window or keyboard shortcuts. The current dropdown list is inconvenient. Any drop-down lists are inconvenient.

    What advice can you give me if I need to make 40 whipshift animation files to animate different flowers and herbs? I hope you will soon do physics and it will help a little to solve such problems.

    @Urr
    Maybe try using Dopesheet and Graph view in unison with Sync button ON. This way the curve you have selected will be automatically filtered in the Dopesheet. And you can see if your animation has some bumps and you can fix the curve immediately.
    Having keyboard shortcuts is a good idea. My preferred workflow is to key everything and then clean up and polish it later. This way I concentrate only on the timing of a whole pose at a given key and just key stuff fast, so I get the motion I need first.
    For your 40 animations first I would see how much and what can I copy then try to work around that.
    And yup, physics is on the way. I have to say it will be cool, still, I am a weirdo who likes to animate everything by hand, so I can add personality even to a simple piece of cloth 🙂

    Thanks, I'll try.

    I tried and I don't understand how curves can be used to make a ladder offset.

    Actually, the curves are the best way to see the offset.

    I'm not need to see offset, i'm need set offset many times in many files. Offset may vary slightly depending on the files. This operation is primitive, but it needs to be done many times. It's tiresome.

    For the best most organic feel, what you want is to slightly change the apex of your curves, so every bone has slightly different values and spacing. Actually, this could be a good topic for a tutorial video.
    Check my video about the Wave principle
    It talks more about animation principles than workflow, but maybe it can be helpful.

    @Urr
    Did you try importing the finished animation, and copying the animation to a new skeleton? Then use curves to scale them to change the values if necessary. I know that repetative stuff is boring, that's why I always try to first see if there is any way I can copy the work already done.

    • Urr replied to this.

      I watched the video and you yourself confirmed my words.

      For fine tuning, the use of curves is appropriate. But I don't need fine tuning. I'm talking about making a ladder offset by selecting the bones and specifying a offset of 5 frames for example. One simple action to select all values. One simple action specifying the number of offset frames. One simple click action apply.

      By the way, the video shows that it is difficult for you to set the offset when dragging the frame value to a new frame. So it's hard for me too.

      Urr I feel your pain. We will brainstorm and see if we can improve our toolset to make redundant operations like this easier to manage.