Hey Rajesh,

We looked at your portfolio, and it looks very good! However, we got a few offers of people who also do the drawing/asset creation. Most of them are not up to animation standards, but since asset creation is a pre, we're looking into them.

If they don't work out, we will contact you again, because your animation and rigging looked very good!

Kind regards,
Adriaan

Hey Rajesh,

I have a question: do you do asset creation as well? Or are you focused on rigging and animation?

Cheers!

Hey Rajesh,

Thanks a lot for the interest and all the info! It looks great! We'll be organizing the replies, and you'll hear back from us later this month.

Speak you soon,
Adriaan

Hey there!

Abbey Games is looking for an experienced Spine animator! Details:

1. You will do most rigging, asset creation and animation for the project.

2. You will work remote as freelancer.

3. There will be dozens of small, animated characters, and some larger, more complex, ones.

4. You will use skins & randomization

5. If we're interested, you will do a paid test assignment first, so we can see if it would work well.

6. VFX experience is helpful, but not necessary.

7. The assignment is expected to last a year or so. Although probably not full time.

Are you interested? Please DM me your portfolio and rates! We would be happy to review your work!

Hope to hear from you!

Hey! Just wanted to post a big thank you for supporting multiple skins in the editor! It's saving us a ton of time!

Hi there,
We still really want this, and if there are any updates I would love to hear them!

Hey, is there an email where I can contact you? Do you have a portfolio we can check out?

AbbeyAdriaan wrote

An update:

We're still working with spine and learning the tool is going well. However, not being able to view and edit multiple skins at the same time (like layers in photoshop) has become increasingly painful with more complex skeletons and texture swaps for different angles. We really need it asap, and are willing to help a hand if possible. We got tool and engine programmers ourselves that might make a good contribution.

Any update on this?

Wuah awesome! Thanks for the kind words. Yeah we're into spine for the next project, but we really need that feature to view multiple skins at once...

I'll keep you in mind if we need any help!

Regards,
Adriaan

Thanks! Looking forward to a reply!

An update:

We're still working with spine and learning the tool is going well. However, not being able to view and edit multiple skins at the same time (like layers in photoshop) has become increasingly painful with more complex skeletons and texture swaps for different angles. We really need it asap, and are willing to help a hand if possible. We got tool and engine programmers ourselves that might make a good contribution.

Thanks again!

We've encountered another issue. We started exporting our spine files, but we made a wrong assessment of our image size. Now we're trying to downsize all images to 25% of their original size. This, of course, messes up the set up. We haven't found a way to reliably adjust the bone size without also changing the attachment size. Our current work around is scaling the images in spine to 400%, and then scaling the root with 25%. This works fine, except that we're working with a 400% scale. Is there a smarter way of doing this? With new files this won't cause any problems of course, since we're working on the right scale.

Hey again!

Two quick things we've found today:

When selecting multiple attachments (either in the same slots or in different ones), I can't tick boxes such as 'Export' on or off - I have to select them all, one by one, manually. How to do this for multiple items at once?

Second, today we accidentally gave a keyframe to a 'sketchy' attachment, which had 'Export' disabled. The export prompt gave us a nice message that this was the case, but exported the slot + attachment anyway. So we spend the last hour of the day looking for our naughty keyframe. Is there a way to improve this? For us it would be ok if there was an export option that just ignores 'Export'-disabled slots entirely, but a quick way to find keyframes of a certain slot through multiple animations could also work.

Thanks again! We're getting a lot more proficient with Spine!

Hey! Thanks for the reply!

The Ctrl+ Shift+L worked great, thanks for the cheat sheet! We only found that keying our first frame in a new animation first required us to do ctrl +L first or something. going in blank and keying everything from the start did not work. But this saves us a lot of time!

Sorry, I used the wrong term. It wasn't the slots, but the skinplaceholders I was talking about. But ctrl+shift+L should fix this too.

The issue you posted seemed fine. It's more that if a certain part of the tree is collapsed - say, the shoulder of a character - that there is no easy way to hide the shoulder, arm, hand and equipment of the character. I need to expand the tree and manually hide everything. It would be great to shift+click on the visibility button to just hide the shoulder and all children, or alt+ click to hide all child attachment or something.

Yes, we do use the filter, but with many bones meshes and attachment we still end up scrolling quite a bit. Using the 'P' shortcut helps, but then we still need to put all the attachments into their skinplaceholder. A dockable 'attachment' windows would go a far way, our parenting by skinplaceholder too instead of only slots. It's not a huge thing, but it saves us a scroll or a find and drag per attachment

We were looking at the wrong place for the Playback view, sorry! It does exactly what we want!

Ah using the Preview is a good work around for now! Good to see you're looking to improve!

We're going to try all this stuff out. Thanks!

Hello there! We at Abbey Games (Reus for PC, PS4 and XBone, Renowned Explorers for PC) are diving into your crafty software to create our next game! We already have some experience using skeletal animation tools, as you can see in Reus and we're looking to get a big advantage in our 2D animations by using Spine! So far we've been impressed by some features and a bit puzzledby others. We hope you can help us in making some magic happen!

To give a bit of context, our new project uses a lot of 2D characters on the screen, with customizable parts like hair, weapons, maybe even armor etc. Some are way more elaborate. Those special characters will have animations that suggests movement in all directions. A bit comparable with Renowned Explorers, as you can see a few times in this video

.
I hope that helps with getting an idea what we would like to achieve.

I would like to dive into the issues we have directly.
So the first and foremost thing we're missing is the ability to work with multiple skins at the same time. All custom parts are on separate skins. So all different coups, all weaponsets, all physical builds and facial features are in different skins. Our engine has that feature built in, so we can preview animations there. However, getting our hair and eyes on exactly the right place during setup is a bit of a pain. I've seen that you're working on supporting this, I just liked to add my +1 to that. Right now we work around it by duplicating slots that are attachment heavy (like a head or hand), call it "sketchy_x", make it yellow and turn of export. It works ok for set-up, but pollutes the hierarchy structure.

Second, we use a lot of twists and turns in the animation, and go pretty wild with switching parts or messing around with the IK. That means we often want to set Keyframes on the whole skeleton for example in the beginning of an animation, so that when we add something extra in the set-up, it doesn't mess too much with the skeleton if possible. If I'm correct, you can keyframe a lot of the properties of a skeleton with ctrl+L, except for visibility of skinplaceholders. (Correct me if I'm wrong). E.g. we twist our warrior around, going from a stretching pose from the front, to a releasing pose showing his back and changing the IK and sprites. We found the best way to do this is by making two sets of arms and keeping one invisible at start and the other visible at start. While we've been using ctrl+L to key the frames, it didn't look like the visibility of the slots was keyed, as some parts seemed to appear and disappear again.
Maybe we just stumbled around a bit and Ctrl+L also keys visibility, but in case not, we're looking for it!

One feature that would help as well is being able to "hide all children" in the hierarchy explorer. right now you have to manually hide/show all children of a bone or slot. For editing purposes, it would be nice to alt+click the show/hide button and make it hide/show the bone and all its children.

Dockable windows for for example images, slots, or IK's would be nice too. We find ourselves scrolling from images to bones quite a bit, since using the P shortcut doesn't place images in skinplaceholders, and we only use that.

But the feature we would really love to see the most is having a way to change the playback speed in the animation! Especially since tweening can have some unforeseen effects, it would be nice to see how things are going wrong.

A bonus would be a way to setup a skeleton while animating. That way we can mess around with the bones in a certain pose, smack some new textures on them, and adjust the textures to the bones using that pose. Right now, you have to go to setup, put the character in that pose, do the above....and put everything back since all animations are relative to the setup. Our work around is to just have multiple limbs of things that change a lot, like the multiple arms, and just hide the arms you're not using.

I hope you can help us, and any tips are welcome!