What character size is preferable for animation?

EEIvanov · 2024년 11월 30일

Sometimes, you need to draw a detailed character.
For example, I chose a conditional scale of 1 meter = 1000 pixels.

I draw a person 1.8 meters tall, i.e. 1800 pixels high. I cut, export, assemble into a spine and get a skeleton with sprites 1800 pixels high. The character can be taller, have a long weapon, effects above the head, etc.

I noticed that with this scale, the spine editor limits the area. That is, the maximum height of the editor area is about 6000 pixels.

I am afraid that when adding weapons or anything that goes beyond 6000 pixels in height, I will not be able to animate it normally in the spine. The editor will not allow it.

I know that I can draw in any resolution and export the drawing from Photoshop at a scale of 0.5, 0.25.

But then I will lose some detail in the animation.
I am also interested in the question of exporting animation to JSON and the 2048 settings - should it be increased to 4096 or 8192?

Are there any standards and recommendations for the height and width of standard animation?

Nate · 2024년 12월 1일

When working with Spine, the character size just needs to be large enough to be comfortable: easy to see, large enough to place things precisely, etc. If it's very small or very large, it's less comfortable to work on, though this can be adjusted for with Bone scale.

At runtime, the size can be the same, larger, or smaller than in the editor. The same skeleton and animation data can be used with different size images. This means the size in the editor should never be a limiting factor, even if you have chosen a very large or small size.

Spine's UX is optimized for roughly sizes that fit on your screen at 100% zoom. Smaller or larger is also fine, but you may find some UX issues like zooming is too fast or tool slow, or the bones and other icons are too small or too large. To fix that, adjust Spine's Bone scale setting. Eg, increase it if your skeleton is very large, decrease if very small. This will solve the problem with not being able to zoom out far enough because your skeleton is large, and other UX issues.

It's common to paint at a higher resolution, scale down for work in Spine at "reasonable" sizes, then pack a texture atlas for whatever sizes are needed at runtime. Some apps pack at multiple sizes and use the closest one based on user screen resolution, improving graphics quality.

When packing a texture atlas there are no size restrictions except what your GPU can handle, but consider how much video memory will be needed to load your images at runtime and what devices you expect your app to run on. Many apps target a 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 max texture atlas page image size.

Import Data with JSON can be used to change the size of the images you use in the editor:
https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-import#Scale