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  • Best way to put multiple attachments into one skin?

Hi everyone,

I've been messing with this workflow for a while now and I'm trying get opinions.

Just a quick recap, we have many 2D characters with a lot of different heads and different armor types. I've got a bunch of armor skins and now I'm trying to put all of the heads onto one attachment so with every skin type I can change out the different heads as the user chooses, etc. The problem is the heads change based on the animation, so if a character is attacked the head will bleed and I have every type of head with a bloody head or turning head and whatnot. Right now I have a different skin for each head attachment (Light armor, red hair// Light armor brown hair// etc), which I know is not efficient.

It looks like the skin placeholder option can only hold one image at a time so I'm stumped on how I can have all of my attachment options per skin.

I'm sure there is a better way. Hopefully I'm explaining this correctly. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

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For example:
You animate the head in three states.
Head neutral. Head smile. Head hurt.
Based on the animation, you will use one of those three heads.

Then you have an "orc" skin.
So you would make the images accordingly. Orc head neutral, Orc head smile, Orc head hurt.
Then create 3 skin placeholders. Head neutral. Head smile. Head hurt.
Put Orc head neutral in Head neutral.
Put Orc head smile in Head smile.
Put Orc head hurt in Head hurt.

If your problem is that you need to combine different head types with different armor types, that's not something you can currently preview in the editor.
But what you would do is have the different head types as skins, and different armor types as skins. You would not put the head types and armor types in the same skin unless you want them to be inflexible.

At runtime (on the game engine side), you would create a new skin by combining the skins you created in Spine.

Okay,

Thanks for the info. I may need to just make the headtypes individual skins because they vary too much.

2 years later

So now I have a head slot, with 3 skin placeholders for the states for the orc.
I want to create the same for elf. I cannot put the elf states into those states.
The ONLY way I managed to do so is to create a slot for Elf head and a slot for Orc head, associate these with the elf and orc skin and then create an animation key for neutral mouth, smile and hurt within the animation. Now, if I have 10 different types that's a lot of animation keys.
I was hoping for a more versatile way, where I have a skin placeholder for elf and orc with the mouth slot and then a subgroup for the 3 states, requiring me to create only one animation key independent of the skin chosen.

@ghostdog You don't need to create a slot for each different skin, on the contrary, the slot should be the same.

  1. create a skin for the elf and one for the orc
  2. select for example the elf skin, then select all of the elf head states that will be in the head slot
  3. create a new skin placeholder for each of these 3 states
  4. change skin to the orc skin
  5. the skin placeholders will now be empty, drag and drop the respective attachments inside of them
  6. animate by turning on or off the skin placeholders

No further specific animation keys should be required this way.
Skins - Spine User Guide

I get it now, Thank you! This is saving me from the slot mayhem I had created.