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  • Any good practices to manage different weapons type and FX ?

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I think there is no 'out of the box' way to do it, but i would like to know your advices to manage FXs and different weapons type.

I would like to have multiple weapons types (hammer, spear, sword and magic spells) as part of the skeleton, and animate all attacks. But my base skeleton can't handle all weapons, because they don't need the same skeleton (Some weapons are mechanicals one, so they all have particularities and specifics FXs).

I thought about:

  • Making a complex bone with the goal to fit all weapons (will reduces possibilities).
  • Create some free bones or full skins placeholders and use them (painfull to animate)
  • Use some skeletons and link at runtime (I'd prefer to use the editor as much as possible)

(+ I would really like to use FFD on some weapons)

Is there a way to animate it using different skeletons or any other solution? 🙂
Thanks !

Hi The Trope!

About FX there are two main approaches:
One is to have them directly inside Spine so that they match the skeleton and animation perfectly, another one is to use a combination of emitter bone and events to generate them at runtime. so it mainly depends on the size and specificity of your skeleton.

Since as you said there's no out of the box solution, it's hard to answer this question without seeing what style you're gonna use for the drawings themselves. Also, a problem I encountered is that some weapons require a different way to be hold.

A solution could be to make all your animations in a version without weapons at first, and then create variations of those animations by using for example a transform constraint that links the hand to the weapon, so you just need to animate the weapon movement and the hands will follow, with the possibility to lower the constraint if needed. Still, I guess this is still painful to animate if you have a lot of animations,
maybe you could group weapons in 2-3 macrogroups based on how the have to be hold and make the custom animations just for that. If you also need to have fancy effects on the weapons you can have a couple bones to be used only when needed.

Also, about the different skeletons, you'll probably have to redo some parts to adapt them, but apparently in the beta you can now copy bones between skeletons 😃

In conclusion, with more information we could give better advice, but yeah you wrote down the possibilities yourself.

Thanks for your answer!

For FXs i'll use both approaches you said.
Your idea in order to make weapon groups is interesting, i'll search more into this.

Well, my drawings are very basic, here is the character:

I already got IK constraints on arms and legs to animate it more easely, will it be okay if I add another weapons constraints on them?

I don't understand your last sentence about skeleton, is there a way to link skeletons in the editor?

Thanks 😃

Oh I see, those feet will probably give you problems if you draw them like that, I also suggest you put the heels on the ground line, it's easier to avoid a floating foot this way.

Yup, you now can move bones from one skeleton to the other if you import both in a project, although I haven't tried the feature out yet.
There are also various fixes you could make on the skeleton since the bones don't fit well with one another, expecially where there are constraints, this could lead to strange behaviours when you move the IK.
Good luck with it (:

Thanks,

When you say 'move bones from one skeleton to the other' you mean on setup or animate mode? Can the other skeleton be used as an 'object pool' in animation mode? And then move bones when necessary from the object pool to my main skeleton.

Erikari wrote

I haven't tried the feature out yet.

I don't know, but my guess is you can't. Bone copying was introduced because people were making animations in the editor and maybe changed something in a similar version of a skeleton and wanted it in the other too, but this thing sounds like something you'd do at runtime in a game engine rather than inside the editor.

I might be wrong so someone else who has already tried this feature should answer.

I’m making intense use of bones for optional body parts or weapons that are not used in every animation.
But it’s painful to know that they are all being calculated silently in runtime - lot’s of them using IKs - which is probably quite expensive.

I thought about some kind of switch in the skeleton tree to tell certain optional bone groups: „Don’t get calculated in runtime in this animation“...?

But in the long term skeleton attachments might be the right solution to get modular skeletons. I have already seen it in Spine Waffle somewhere.

I wouldn't worry until it's a real problem, then you could easily edit the runtime to avoid computation of bones/constraints based on your application state.

...yeah true. Currently we can't notice any impact on the framerate. It's rather in my mind :think: 🙂