Multiple Skeletons or Unnecessary bones?

nngafook

Hi all!

I have one skeleton (and spine project) for the "good guys" of my game, and I was gonna do the same for the bad guys, but the issue is that the bad guys aren't all humanoid.

So as far as my limited knowledge tells me, I have two options. Have a single skeleton (and/or project) for each character, or have one project, with a bunch of bones that may or may not be used for any given character. Eg. one character has legs, but another character is just a blob. So I can animated the blob while the leg bones are there and just ignore them, or make a skeleton for the blob, and thus another data object in Unity.

I was just wondering which way is the "right" way.

Thanks guys!

nngafook

Pharan

If they logically don't move alike and wouldn't be structured alike and aren't the same size/proportions, it wouldn't make sense for them to be shoehorned into a singular skeleton structure.

For example, giant troll vs humanoid vs dog vs blob: Of course you shouldn't use one skeleton for all of them.
That would just make a mess in Spine editor for the animator having to manage hiding and showing bones, and it would incur unnecessary processing on the runtime side.
What would you hope to gain by using only one skeleton?

nngafook

Mainly just being able to have one "Bad Guys" spine asset in unity, so all enemies could reference the same asset.

Proportion-wise, they're all the same, or at least within the same "bounds". If that changes anything.

20 Sep 2016, 20:07

So would you suggest multiple skeletons for the different types needed, in one project, or a separate project per skeleton? I guess at the end of the day it doesn't matter since they all equate to a data object in unity per skeleton right?

Pharan

It's up to you to judge how similar those skeletons are. If they're similar enough and should be similar, just make them share the skeleton. If you start slowing down your artist/animator just because you wanted to avoid adding a tiny amount of code, then you can consider doing otherwise.

nngafook

Well luckily, I'm wearing all of the hats. So I'll just bitch at myself when I start to slow myself down 🙂

Skeleton data and atlases aren't too big right? So having a few of them (it's a smallish mobile game) in total on a per enemy type basis should be okay right?

It's funny, because I'm wearing all of the hats at the moment, I'm trying to optimize all sides. The code is easy, cause it's just going to use the skeleton data on the object, and all the animations will be named the same, so that's not my concern on the code side, it's more the size and performance.
On the animation side, I would love to be able to reuse animations and not have to animate each enemy separately. Not sure if that changes anything, otherwise, yeah I'll probably just do as you said and use the same skeleton if they're similar enough, or I can get away with ignoring the bones that aren't needed in a certain character.