Liveswapping textures?

slutze

I'm currently coming up with a workflow for a new project, and one thing I'm trying to do is allow multiple character sprites to all use the same weapon images, and I'm trying to find the simplest way to do it. For example, I might have a knight and a thief, and they can both swing a sword or a torch.

I know about skins as an option for reusing animations, but since the weapon images might be reused across multiple (many) different characters with different animations, and since there might be a lot of them, would it make more sense to have a single weapon placeholder in Spine and swap the weapon textures in Unity? I'd like to not have to update every character atlas every time I add a new weapon, if possible.

Pharan

Sharing weapons across different characters is not a problem. Different skeletons can share atlases.

But if you don't want to have to update the skeleton every time you add a new weapon, the runtime-defined attachments make sense.
If you're on the latest spine-unity, import the unitypackage examples and check the Example scene named "Mix and Match". Read the text and check out the sample code in MixAndMatch.cs.

That will show you how to use the AttachmentTools methods to create, duplicate and/or remap the textures of existing attachments. Your attachment image source can be sprites, textures or Spine atlases.
Make sure you animate with skin placeholders in Spine editor, and use skins at runtime. At runtime, you can change what those attachment names map to.