Best setup for working from Spine to Unity?

Rick74

I havn't found any threads that answer these specific questions so I guess I'll just make my own.

(sorry if this is a rehash...I am just getting into trying to work with Spine for my Unity project)

So my questions are;

what is the best setup for rigging and animating characters with needed texture swaps?

(ex. Switching weapons, an eye that blinks. That sort of thing) By setup I am referring to both how these extra textures are incorporated into the rig, if at all. And how you swap between them within animations? With Mecanim, when a bone is created, multiple sprites of every state are placed under that bone. And then they are simply toggled visible either through key frames or code. Is this how the set up should be in Spine?

I've read in the documentation that Spine uses the layer sorting feature within Unity to Z - sort. But while using mecanim, I've had issues with multiple characters sorting properly regardless of their depth in Z. Is their a way to change this to using Z values to sort sprite depth?

documentation as to how limited Unity's current sorting layers actually is...
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/official-2d-sorting-feedback.376707/

The only solution I could come up with to fix this was to have all my pieces not in any kind of bone hierchy and simply animate their z value to dictate the z sorting.

Using z value to sort sprites in z.
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Using the layer sorting feature in Unity. When two of the same character type overlap, they follow the same Z sorting with each other which lead to problems.

Has anyone else encountered this issue and if so how did you work around it?

Pharan

Texture swaps are a feature in Spine.
Try opening the Spineboy sample Spine project. His mouth swaps between 3 different images.

"Z-values" for whole GameObjects actually works.
It works if the things you are ordering according to Z are in the same sorting layer and order in layer. Otherwise, those values take higher priority than distance from the camera.
You can read more about it here: Spine-Unity Runtime Documentation
Go to the "Sorting via Camera Distance" section.

If you want Z values per pixel, you're talking about the depth buffer that typical 3D meshes use, which the Spine/Skeleton shader doesn't do and 2D games traditionally don't use.
This alternate shader has that option: Sprite Shaders for Unity
Note that using the depth buffer causes its own problems which all normal 3D games share.
If you choose to go that route, you may have to familiarize yourself with those problems and work around them as you come across them.

Otherwise, until Unity implements its "2D sorting groups" feature, we have to rely on manually assigning sorting order between instances so nothing overlaps incorrectly, or making sure each character is rendered only by one renderer.