Two questions about place holder sprites for Mix and Match

Lion Christ

I am creating a game where different hair, helmet, and shoulder armors can be selected, separately, and have each different appearances for each armor item. I've read that Mix and Match is the way to go about this. When reading up on this method, there is sometimes the mention of place holders for the cases where there would be nothing there, because it is difficult to add/remove bones. I just want to make sure I understand this correctly before I start rigging. Does this mean if I had, say, a helmet with some feathers, and then another helmet without feathers, I should have the feathers bones setup for each, and the feather helmet will have feather sprites attached to the bone and the helmet with no feathers will have a blank png file attached to the bone? Am I not understanding this correctly at all?

Harald

I would recommend having a separate skin for each item (a skin for each helmet, each pair of shoulder-plates, each pair or trousers, and so on) and then combine the equipped skins to a new skin. The following posting by Nate lists a few URLs which might be very helpful, if you haven't already checked it out: Combining Skins

Regarding feathered helmets and helmets without feathers: When using skins for each item, you could use Skin Bones to have some bones only active when the feathered helmets is equipped. You might also want to have a look at the Spine example project Mix-and-match which makes use of Skin bones. Every bone with a skin icon (the orange T-shirt) next to it is a skin bone, only enabled when the respective skins are active.

In any case, you should not need to attach a blank png image at all, it should be easier to just not add this attachment at a skin (or delete it in case it was added before).