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  • New competitor enters skeletal animation

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You should tell them what you like in particular. Screenshots and stuff.

Nate and Shiu will appreciate feedback on some specific things that users like to see in Spine.

While I've only done basic animations in Spine thus far, if I had to list features, it would be these:

  1. Motion capture / rotoscoping and animation transfer
    (At about 2:10 in this video)

  1. Cloth dynamics / weighted physics

  1. Auto walk cycles / walk motors

  2. Path animation

Of all these though, I think the motion capture is very impressive. In addition, check out the videos on cloth/hair dynamics. It's very interesting how they are using weights and physics to achieve it.

There is also a nice animated Tiger which no doubt is great for marketing:

There are a bunch of YouTube videos of the app here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPqZjHnq8U1hFehOUqEmgyQ

It's obvious the people/person who made this put a lot of effort into it, observing that Spine is it's only real competition.

I originally thought it was only for Cocos. Looks like it has some other major runtimes too. Unity. MonoGame. Even libGDX. :p
Good luck as a mac-only app though.

I think its idea of "Motors" is the most interesting and it seems to be its go-to way of doing stuff.
Looks like "Motors" are actually procedural animation controllers right inside the system that can pull data from its data structures (like curves) and modify its other skeleton parts (like bones and mesh vertices), whereas in Spine, everything's currently just keyed-animated stuff, and you have to do all your procedural stuff yourself in your engine without the help of visual tools. I think the closest thing Spine currently has as a proto-"motor" is IK.

I think going through the different kinds of motors could be very informative.

I think the thing Creature has going for it is that it has a lot of ready-made animation features in it. They're actually quite powerful even if they're potentially inefficient as hell. And with computing power these days, I think it might actually end up a better choice for people who just want to just jump in and make stuff quickly for, say, motion comics or interactive story books or something, where immediately charming animations is important and functional flexibility isn't.

Motion Capture also looks fun.

It's also unfortunate for Creature that it has a number of things not going for it. And for all the cool things it can do and make easy, there doesn't seem to be samples of actual game characters functioning in an actual game environment. That actually makes me wonder how easy it would be to create a functional character skeleton in it and make it actually work in a sidescrolling game, or a top-down game, or an isometric game. It looks like it hasn't gained much of a following enough to have actual game asset animators making demos for it.

Personally, I would love it if Spine had some built-in procedural controllers for stuff like secondary motion that you could adjust and view in the editor. That way, we wouldn't have a million keys and be all silly worrying about key offsets in loops and stuff.

4 months later

Other stuff from Creature:

This physic dynamic of cloths and hair ... <3

Thanks for sharing. This is really informative.

To anyone who has access rights to change topic titles, can you add "Creature" to it?
like...
"Creature: New competitor enters skeleton animation"

Cool demo! The character frame rate in engine looks like its been baked down to sprite sheets though - is this the case?

2 months later

Most of this cuts no ice with me but I have to admit that a motion capture/rotoscope feature sounds like a fascinating thing.
Just the idea of beeing able to load a video as reference into (let's wish for it) spine sounds very compelling. (Even though it's use for rotoscoping would be limited for realistic artstyles... but... you know. It sounds so cool 😉 :p )

4 months later