Hello! this feature is not available yet but is planned: Group folders for animations, slots · #20 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor

ooooh... I am finding that this would be highly useful.... tired of scrolling through three or four pages of everything in the Hierarchy. Any ETA at all for this?

PS. Thank you for the heads up on this already tho, I look forward to it!

I was expecting a folder system to have already been implemented as it's one of fundamental parts of an graphics design / animation UI. I honestly thought I was going crazy when I spent ages trying to search for it to prevent my workspace from becoming an abominable cluster of body parts that couldn't be grouped together.

I've noticed that the reply was only a month ago, but you've noted the issue regarding this since 2016. Is there an ETA on this because it's honestly by far the biggest problem I find with this software so far when handing any characters that are broken up into multiple interchangeable parts.

Hi tykonn, why can't you group body parts together? does your character have a lot of arms or accessories? Usually, you'd want to place different poses of the same thing into the same slot, to activate when needed, or also use bones to hold parts of the skeleton together. For example, you could store all the special effects images under a bone called VFX, or you could store different sets of hands under the slot "hand". Basic Concepts - Spine User Guide: Slots
The issue is about folders to group animations together, is it also your case?

I am putting body parts together under a bone so that I can find them more easily.
For most of the characters I worked with, I always need to toggle visibility for groups. e.g. to change between pose, etc.

Can you take a look on the little suggestion below about a shortcut to toggle attachments under a bone?
Right now, it still need users to toggle each of the parts one by one even under the same parent bone which is quite time consuming. This change only takes very little work but would improve the workflow a lot as I am finding myself always dealing with complex spine characters and need to toggle the visibility of groups (not include the parent bone so that the bone still appear on the canvas) during rigging and animating.

shortcut to toggle attachments under a bone?

AND I seriously need a shortcut to toggle the "Select" check box of a selected attachment... I don't find the mapping available in the config file. Also for the six toggles in the option panel as I always need to turn off the images visibility leaving out the selected image for defining mesh.

Hi fantasyz, I think you're absolutely right and we have issues for these:
Multi select for mesh properties · #137 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor

Regarding toggling visibility, you can do it quickly by right-clicking a bone (if it's visual clutter in the editor, this will hide all of the children bones and slots)
if you need to hide/unhide attachments, the best thing you could do is have a dummy animation to copy the keys from.
(you can see what I mean in this video at 9:48 where the pose is copied from the turnaround animation Twitch: Animating an 8-direction character in Spine Pt.5 - YouTube )

How should a shortcut to toggle visibility of the attachments work? something like Shift+R click to hide only the attachments children of the selected bones, that works if you do it on a bone, but does not affect children bones? I think a problem might arise when you then click again, as there would be multiple options (reactivate the first attachment for each slot under the selected bone? but what if you don't need all of them? reactivate all the attachments that were hidden in the timeline? how should this work in setup pose?) so I guess more discussion is needed on this.
I think the best option on this is the dummy animation I mentioned above, I tested it and I guarantee it's a reasonably fast workflow, it just requires you to set the pieces first once.

The suggested shortcut is just a work around for the current version of Spine, which is missing visibility management function. Let me first push the discussion further by telling my thought on the questions you raised first.

How should a shortcut to toggle visibility of the attachments work?
Something like Shift+R click to hide only the attachments children of the selected bones, that works if you do it on a bone, but does not affect children bones?

Yes, if current [R-Click] is to toggle bones, [CTRL+R Click] should be consistent with that so it should only affect attachments.

I think a problem might arise when you then click again, as there would be multiple options (reactivate the first attachment for each slot under the selected bone? but what if you don't need all of them? reactivate all the attachments that were hidden in the timeline? how should this work in setup pose?) so I guess more discussion is needed on this. 

As a simple shortcut like this, I do not expect it to have complex logic. The behaviour should be toggling all children attachments. Again, it should be consistent with R-Click counterpart. When use R-Click to reactivate child bones, it also doesn’t consider whether I want all of them or only some of them. It does not remember previous states for each child bones too. So I guess it make sense to do the same.
Since there could be multiple attachments in a single slot, best case is to remember and reactivate the last active one. However, reactivating the first attachment in a slot is also acceptable especially when compared to not having this shortcut at all. At worst, people who afraid this shortcut messing up their attachments could just not use this shortcut at all and do it their own way.

I think the best option on this is the dummy animation I mentioned above, I tested it and I guarantee it's a reasonably fast workflow, it just requires you to set the pieces first once.

It could be the a better option for now when compared to toggling each attachment one by one. However, isn't it only works in animating mode? and this approach is a little too workaround in my opinion. Most importantly, it doesn’t hurt to have more ways solve this problem, especially when there isn’t many attachments under each slot. Having a simple click to do the job is definitely mush convenient and faster than creating animation and copying and pasting key over. Not to mention it works even outside animation mode.

My thought is: this short-cut doesn't conflict with your dummy animation approach. In fact, they should co-exist as one of them target precise control but require more setup and the other is fast and simple best suit for simple scenario where slots don't have multiple attachments.

We could use ctrl or shift + right click to toggle attachments under a bone. I hate to use up a modifier, just in case we come up with a better use of it in the future, but this seems OK. We'll see if we can do something smart for toggling a slot which has no attachments visible.

One thing you can do is select multiple attachments (which can be done more easily by choosing the "attachments only" filter in the tree, then click the first, then hold shift and click the last), then left click the visibility dot of a selected attachment. This will toggle all the selected items.

In the last post, I mentioned current version of Spine is like missing visibility management feature. I would like to elaborate more on this as I think this part is quite important.

The ideal case in my mind is that Spine should allow user to save all the current attachment visibility combination as a present. (I am not good at English so not sure if "present" is the correct word here).
The workflow is like :

1. adjust the attachment states
2. save current attachment states as a present with a name.

All presents are list in a standalone UI panel which would probably look like:
1.Idle [Load][Delete]
2.Attack [Load][Delete]

When need to change to a present, simply click on the [Load] button on the panel with minimal effort.
I can also create present that is mainly for editing, hiding some part so that I can easily work on layers below.
This will also make switching between skins much more managed.

Note that the presents should be remembering which attachments are active instead of which are inactive.
Otherwise, when adding new attachment / skin to the project, existing presents would be messed up and have extra attachment active unexpectedly.

This is the ideal design I can think of. Hope this could help.

One more thing about the current [R-Click] or future [Shift+R Click]. It would be great if I can change from setting to control whether the parent bone would be affected or the action simply affect the children. For myself, 99% of the time I only want the children to be turned off leaving the parent always visible. I generally would have a container bone on the side of the canvas for quick access to some part of the character. Turning both parent and children off would make the bone not visible form canvas making it hard to find when need to turn it back on. Right now I need to click the parent bone again after R-Click to have parent bone stay visible. An extra click may not sound much but sometime I may just forget to click it and get lost afterward. If mentioned setting exist, it would help a lot.

Thanks

We have always wanted a "selection layers" view very similar to what you describe. It would allow you to save and load selections and toggle visibility.

Right click not toggling the current bone might throw people off, not just because it changes the current behavior but because if the bone is collapsed, it may not be apparent that anything changed. If ctrl/shift + right click toggles attachments in all children, the bone visibility wouldn't be affected.

Note you can left click drag the visibility dots to set many to the same value.

Thanks for your feedback, it is helpful! Also, super cool skeleton! 8)