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Hi,

So, against my advice (my advice being important as I am the expert on spine and integration of spine into engines) the company I work for, has started to go down a path of creating assets "efficiently". Previously, all characters* had their own skeletons, This meant the characters had a lot of character to them, each one would move in a different way (this adds a lot because of the content of the game).

Now the company has decided to ... condense them into 2-3 skeletons (short, normal, tall) and skin the characters onto those skeletons. The reason for this was primarily because adding new animations was laborious. For example If you wanted 40 characters to have a dance animation, the animation would have to be created on each skeleton 40 times. which can consume quite a lot of time for the animators.

However, I fear , and we are already lightly experiencing this, Characters will need custom animations for their character. for example, a character holding a cake :cake: will need different movement animations (because he is holding a cake) and other unique animations (there are a lot of instances like this).

Additionally, I think the characters that use the base animations, would loose, um... character. The character line-up now is great, I love it, there is so much personality in the characters, the way they walk, the way they are idle. For instance, an old man, would walk vastly differently to a Playboy Philanthropist . Having an old man walk with the same swagger would, at least in my opinion, would look bad. (old man vs Playboy Philanthropist is a comparable between any of our characters).

So, sure, now lets say these 40 characters have their own animation set, so they don't lose any personality. 3 animations(this is a very conservative guess) for 20 characters, (say a couple can re-use each others anims) is still 60 animations, that's not to mention base animations. Which is just going to clutter the workspace. A solution to this may be to put each character into its own project file or if it uses the same animations, make it a skin in that project, making a lot easier to manage. You could then import any additional animations (as the skeleton would be the same for all characters) without having to recreate it.

So using this solution, you are to make unique animation sets for each character group (character group, are characters that have the same animations) , and those character groups have unique skins. And each character group would be in its own project. This is where my problem comes in:

Is it really that much of a hassle to have different, unique skeleton for each of the character groups as you will have to re-animate it anyway. This will allow you not to be constrained by the default skeleton, which is spread across all characters. Allowing you to make the old man have a hunched back, and the Playboy Philanthropist stand tall. I understand to add, say, a dance animation to all character groups would take more time, but would not being limited buy a generic skeleton worth it? I would argue it is.

One downside of having character groups with a unique skeletons is you could potentially have more projects, if they did not have unique skeletons as the latter would group together easier.

I am interested to hear what you think, before I approach my boss again.

Thanks,
BC

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:mail:

It makes sense to use skins when possible

which is when animations can be the same and work for your content. If two skeletons are different enough that they can't share animations, then it makes sense to use multiple skeletons. One extreme is a single skeleton, and the other extreme is a separate skeleton per character. If separate skeletons are too much work (a management call), it makes sense to compromise by moving toward the other extreme. Eg, maybe the old man has his own skeleton because he's so different, and everybody else is ok with the short, medium, or tall skeleton. If sticking all your animations into short, medium, or tall skeletons doesn't work for some characters and you don't want them to have separate skeletons, there may be other solutions. Maybe you can reuse most animations except for a couple, eg the old man and a zombie go in the medium skeleton as skins but need their own walk animations. Maybe you can adjust setup pose bone positions to make the animations work for the guy holding the cake, or a character with a longer torso or wider shoulders than everyone else. Your artists need to take your skeleton setups into consideration too, eg so they don't design a character that doesn't work with the animations (such as the cake holding guy).

Ultimately if the boss says short, medium, tall skeletons are the way to go due to resources and they are willing to lose the customization and variety separate skeletons would give you, you'll have to make it work. Adjust the animations and character design as best you can. It's much better to finish a project than to have a beautifully animated, half finished project. :coffee:

Nate wrote

Ultimately if the boss says short, medium, tall skeletons are the way to go due to resources and they are willing to lose the customization and variety separate skeletons would give you, you'll have to make it work. Adjust the animations and character design as best you can. It's much better to finish a project than to have a beautifully animated, half finished project. :coffee:

The problem is, I don't think the boss realises how much customisation would be lost 🙁

Then show them. It's always better to show and let them come to their own conclusion than to try to argue.

I recently(last April?) wrapped work on a project with 20 characters/skelketons, and roughly 125 animations each in the main game and another 20 skeletons with 15-20 animations for mini games. As the animation director/supervisor I was planning on having lots of custom animations to put each character's personality on display but that was back when the project hadn't expanded to the number of animations listed above.
We ended up compromising by reusing the same base skeleton for each character but adjusting bone length and location in setup so we didn't end up with the same body with skins slapped on top. Since we used the same skeleton from the beginning it was easy to import animations from one character to another. This way we could group characters based on personality, or have a single "generic" character animated and import from them, then tweak the animations to fit each character. Eventually the project boiled down to having just one or two personality animations that really sold who they were and mild tweaks to the majority of the animations because the growth in number of animations was getting ridiculous 🙂

I hope that bit of rambling made sense. I'm behind on my coffee intake today.

24andahalf wrote

It does, thank you. We where thinking of doing the same thing, but I fear, because the bones moving around, it means the new imported animation would have to be tweaked/ changed anyway. And there is not a whole lot of difference in tweaking an animation and creating a new one/

Yeah. I have no idea how complex your cast of characters are. In our situation every character was roughly the same body type(subtle height/width differences) and idle poses were all 99% the same so the process of tweaking was nothing compared to starting fresh.

Anyway, good luck with your situation!

50 characters, 150 skins, god know how many anims, 1 skeleton :yes:

I'm no expert with Spine (yet! <3) but I know what it is to have 10 animations for 50 characters, using Flash. Terrible context. But it was necessary since an Eagle and an Orc can't possibly share the same skeleton (even Goblin and Orc actually).

Anyway I have an habit that helped me, and I'm considering going this way again with Spine => once you're happy with the Orc animation, you duplicate the project, insert Goblin skins instead, and you rework the whole thing. The amount of time needed for tweaking an animation is, from my experience, around 2-4 time inferior than building from scratch. Plus, considering how Spine transition and positions are smart, it's quite easy to move your Goblin's body parts around and Boom, it works.

Edit: just realize 24andahalf suggested basically the same thing but hey, that will make another source 🙂

2 years later

Well, coming at this somewhat late as only just started looking at Spine - but coming from a games background (mobile in particular), yep, I can definitely see the case for reducing unique skeletons!!

But could blending be utilised in code, to mix some anims up a little ingame..? Maybe just as simple as bending your elderly man over more more during his walkcycle? (if they've got bandwidth for 20 skeletons i'd imagine they might have some bandwidth for blending anims?). I know it's not the perfect answer for any perfectionist - ie: Animator! 😃 - but a few small tweaks in code could go a long way..