Custom slot material is not working in SkeletonGraphic

Katana

When using GetRemappedClone to create a new Attachment in Unity, the Attachment will render using the provided material. This works as expected in SkeletonAnimation, but not in SkeletonGraphic. SkeletonGraphic still uses the default material. Could this be related to the issue mentioned here: EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimesissues/1982? Is SkeletonGraphicCustomMaterials the only workaround for now?

Harald

Katana SkeletonGraphic still uses the default material. Could this be related to the issue mentioned here: EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimesissues/1982?

This is not really an issue ticket, it's a feature ticket to provide a component to override the used materials at target slots. It is related, but not the cause, rather it could be a future workaround to achieve what you want.

Is SkeletonGraphicCustomMaterials the only workaround for now?

It depends on your use case, it likely is the most flexible workaround for now. As an alternative, you could also set the slot of the replaced attachment to a blend mode which you normally don't use (e.g. to screen) and assign your target material for this blend mode under blend mode materials (in the Inspector under SkeletonGraphic - Advanced). That's a rather strange workaround however.

What kind of material do you want to apply at your custom attachment only? Perhaps there are other more comfortable alternatives to achieve what you want to do.

Spinebot

Yes, the behavior you're experiencing with SkeletonGraphic not applying custom slot materials as expected is consistent with the limitations of SkeletonGraphic in the Spine-Unity runtime. As mentioned in the provided contexts, SkeletonGraphic has structural limitations that prevent it from supporting custom slot materials directly, unlike SkeletonAnimation which can handle custom materials more flexibly.

The SkeletonGraphicCustomMaterials component is indeed a workaround for applying custom materials to SkeletonGraphic, but it has its limitations and does not support custom slot materials as powerfully as SkeletonRendererCustomMaterials does for SkeletonAnimation. This is due to the inherent limitations of SkeletonGraphic, including the single atlas texture limitation and the inability to support multiple submeshes or materials, as highlighted in the contexts.

The issue you referenced (EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimesissues/1982) might be related if it discusses limitations or bugs affecting material handling in SkeletonGraphic. For now, using SkeletonGraphicCustomMaterials with its limitations or switching to SkeletonAnimation for more complex material customizations are the primary workarounds.

Katana

Harald The material I used is the same as the original one(Spine/SkeletonGraphic). In our project, players can equip various weapons, which come from a separate atlas rather than the atlas exported by Spine. At runtime, we need to replace the sprite in the template attachment with the sprite from the atlas where the weapon is located. That's why we use GetRemappedClone() to create a new attachment. Therefore, we need two materials for rendering the character and the weapon separately. Is there a better solution available?

Harald

@Katana Sorry for the late reply. You could consider runtime repacking to have everything on a single atlas texture. Apart from that, I'm afraid SkeletonGraphicCustomMaterials is the best solution currently available for your use-case.