Flipbook Constraint?

giuseppe

Was wondering if it was possible to have a bone that we can rotate that would cycle through an assigned set of images based on it's translation or rotation? Would be a lot easier than diving through a list of images to key on if we could just move or rotate a bone and it change to a particular frame/image we want.

Just a thought for discussion,

Thank you,

Giuseppe

Nate

You can't currently tie attachment changes to bone movements, sorry! Doing that and similar constraints like tying different transform properties together (eg rotation to translation) is planned.

giuseppe

Good to hear! more I think about it, the more interesting it seems - picking a particularly posed leg attach/image based on leg angle, or wrist or whatever - could really streamline certain kinds of animation!

giuseppe

Had a look at Moho and it's Smart Bones today, specifically some examples for vectors where they interpolate between different states.

Obviously with bitmaps we cannot have this flexibility, but it certainly would be nice, in addiiton to being able to go to different images or attachments, but also to interpolate things like scale, rotation, transform based on the bone rotation. I guess that is what you mean!

I think its definitely an interesting way of working and something I look forward to seeing. Whether it is scale-rotate-transform interpolation, or flipping through a defined list of attachments (with the ability to order them) it would be very interesting!

Smart Controller? Don't know, but would love to hear others' thoughts.

Misaki

giuseppe You may find the following thread interesting:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/25654-request-new-timeline-constraint-linking-art-and-animations-to-bone-positions

Nate

Yep! The issue to track the enhancement is here:
EsotericSoftware/spine-editor121

A UI possibility:
Loading Image

giuseppe

great stuff. Also thought about linking mesh states i.e blendshaping / morph targeting. could work a lot like Moho's vector stuff does. take a meshed sprite, 'sculpt' its mouth open for example, and as the smart bone rotates, it morphs to that state from the default state. or muscle bulge or whatever.

initially i thought nah bitmaps, we can't have all that stuff... but we can, kind of. we have proper meshes, not just quads.

giuseppe

Moho calls these actions i think, in combination with smart bones. so we could have the initial state of a character facing forward, and we could then create a state tied to a smart bone rotation, that moves all the eyes nose and mouth to the side of the face, AND smooshes the verts around, AND potentially swaps things - tied to smart bone rotations.

We can basically have it all in spine. it's a big ask, but it's a massive selling point for moho - enough to make me want to switch from spine pro.

giuseppe

basically take your initial 'state', and then create a new one and then just do anything to any bones, sculpt the mesh, etc etc, and save that to a rotation on the bone and then it just interpolates to that state as you rotate.

shy

Note that some of that blendshaping can be done already, via bone weights on meshes and transform constraints, or via deform keys. You can move linked bones by a mix % of another bone's movement, in different local directions, and rig your mouth or muscle mesh to many bones to blend between poses.

There are also manual deform keys (move any vert linearly to a new position at any time on your animation timeline), which will work for your exported video workflow. This generally isn't recommended for runtime export for games though, because it is inefficient. I agree that visual sculpting and keying is more intuitive than the weight and constraint method though, so that may be what you want.