Asymmetrical Characters

shogoki

Hi guys, artist/animator here! 🙂
I've got a question regarding characters with asymmetrical design. I'm animating a character whose design is pretty much the same on both sides except for his arms, he has a pretty distinctive armor on his right hand. All the animations are facing left, the armor visible, since that is how the programmers need it. So I'm wondering what when we flip it?

I have the armor on a separate slot from the arm beneath, so I can simply hide it when needed. But I wanna know what is the drill with that situation. Can they simply hide that armor within unity when the player is facing in the other direction, or is that something I have to take care of in Spine first?

I'm interested in learning about how you deal with asymmetrical characters facing different directions. :yes:

Pharan

Definitely a number of ways to handle it.

I like to do it the skins way: One skin for facing right, another for facing left. And in the engine, making sure to switch between skins when the character turns. It's some extra work of course, especially if those parts move around independently, and also if your animations are asymmetrical too (like if the punch animation always has to be on the right hand).

Søren

It can be helpful to put in an event to trigger skin changes or which images should be visible when a flip is made. If set up correctly this could be handled almost entirely by code leaving more time to focus on making cool animations 🙂

shogoki

Thanks for the info! Pharan your suggestion helped!
We've made it work in the following way: the protagonist already had two skins; one for the front view and another for profile, so we duplicated those and just swapped some attachments to differentiate left and right facing skins. This proved to be practical enough, and since most mesh animations are handled by bones, there wasn't much extra work needed to tweak the basic movements. Wish I could show you guys what it all looks like, but I gotta be patient. 🙂

Nate

It's ok, we won't tell anybody. 😉