Based on my knowledge, Spine has a feature that can help you duplicate bone hierarchies! Here's how you can approach this:
Duplicating a bone hierarchy:
You can duplicate a parent bone along with all its children by using the orange duplicate button in the tree properties. When you duplicate a bone, Spine will ask if you also want to duplicate the keys - if you say yes, all child bones, slots, attachments, and animation keys under that bone will also be duplicated.
For symmetrical setups (like left/right limbs):
The workflow typically involves:
- First create and animate your setup completely on one side
- Duplicate the parent bone of your entire hierarchy (Spine will duplicate all children with it)
- Reposition and flip the duplicated bones as needed for the opposite side
- If you need to copy animation transforms between the two sides, you can use the bone transform copy/paste feature in local axis to achieve mirrored results
Important limitation:
Unfortunately, constraints cannot be duplicated automatically yet. You'll need to recreate those manually on the duplicated side. However, you can copy and paste constraint properties between bones to speed up this process.
For weights:
If your bones have weighted meshes, when you duplicate bones this way, the weights are automatically modified to use the corresponding duplicated bones where possible.
This approach should work well for creating a symmetrical left-right setup from a complex right-oriented bone hierarchy, though you'll need to manually recreate any constraints you're using.
