Hello Kewn and welcome on the forums!
First, I appreciate the use of images and examples to get your point across, and I totally understand the initial struggle.
The multiple poses integration is a delicate topic when the poses are very different, but it's possible to solve it with a little less pain.
For example, the first approach you took, as you can see, can work pretty well if you don't have a great number of poses, but it's gonna turn into a nightmare pretty quickly if the number of poses goes up.
The second approach is what is reccomended, and here we have two ways of integrating alternative elements:
a. we take single elements with the same orientation, such as 10-20 hands, and bulk position them in place. usually works like charm, expecially if you don't have to deform it later, or you do but you don't have to move the setup skeleton, so it's painless.
It's probably the case of your axe, leg, body, head, you could do almost all of your rig this way. Regarding the arm, if you cut it in the middle leaving border on the image behind and no border on the image up, I'm sure you could manage to do it with no deformations at all and maybe a couple swaps. If you're looking into making it really pretty you could have deformations, but I suggest you look more into how meshes work and the best places to put vertexes to make the arm bend nicely.
(for more: esotericsoftware.com/spine-meshes )
b. the pose is completly different, and some parts need to deform too.
This can happen, and if the above method is not enough, here's a workflow I'm using to avoid ugly things to happen:
- Export all the poses in a json from photoshop and import them into your project under a bone called "alt poses" that you will later delete, just to keep things tidy
- Import your spine project inside your spine project as a second skeleton and call that skeleton "backup", then deactivate the backup skeleton
- Isolate all the alt images for a pose and make them visible. Then start aligning the skeleton to the images.
- put each alt image in its righful slot, mesh and bind the images that need it
- import the project again and name the skeleton with the alt pose you rigged, deactivate it
- activate your backup skeleton, select all the bones (I generally store the selection with
ctrl+1 so that I can recall it fast by pressing 1) then in world mode press ctrl+c
- activate your original skeleton, select all the bones (it's easier to do if you filter the tree for bones, then select all of them, IKs too.) and press
ctrl+v.
it's important to have the IK all with the same bending, so if you've changed it, take it back to restore the pose or ugly things will happen.
it's also important to have the same number of bones and to not having deactivated "inherit rotation" etc. for the sake of this part, you can reactivate them when you've finished though.
- repeat until there's no alt images left.
- take your original skeleton, if some meshes turned ugly in setup pose (it can happen because of a rotation bug we currently are in the process of fixing) simply copy them from the backup skeleton and move them in place of the distorted meshes.
- in animate mode create animations for the alt poses. Do so by selecting the bones of the alt skeletons that were prepared before, copy them and paste them inside the animation.
- you can delete the alt poses skeletons.
Of course the alt poses back in setup pose will look very ugly, but used with the correct placement of the bones that were stored, they'll work like charm.
A couple tips:
it's advisable to prepone the name of the pose to the part, such as:
idle-head
attack-head
this way if you filter the tree to attachments they will get automatically listed in order of animation, you can then select all of them with shift and press H to hide or show them all at once.
(if you forgot to do this you can bulk-rename them using RegEx in Spine.)
It's also useful to place rulers in your photoshop document and make the ruler origin be the same as the root position in Spine, this way adding skins/alt poses/VFX/Flying unicorns to your skeletop later on will be way easier.
It's nice to create a little animation to keep as a library of commonly used poses, where on a frame you activate a certain group of parts, on the next frame you place the bones/animate them/etc. and on the third frame you deactivate the alt frames to go back to the idle pose. This will help speed up the process of animating later on.
If you have doubts, I'm here to clarify parts (: I'll probably make a video to explain the workflow better in the future.
