Set Up Question Skins

NNWW

Hi 🙂

Very new to Spine, but kinda lost after trying to find the correct way to do this for a few hours.

HOW do would any of you set up a character that has a turn around, a few different Shoes, Hands, etc, but also should have Skins (in the sense of: Player gets let's say a Hat to equip their character with, or a different set of shoes, etc)

I made a rig, which is basically like this:
Hat Bone

Hat Slot 1
Head Bone
Head Slot (here there are 5 faces - only one is able to be seen at times)
-- Front Face Image/ Attachment
-- 3/4 Down Face Image/ Attachment
-- Side Face Image/ Attachment
-- 3/4 Up Face Image/ Attachment
-- Up Face Image/ Attachment
Eye Bone Left
Eye L Slot
-- Eye 1
Eye Bone Right
-- Eye 1 (same but mirrored)
...
Shoe L Bone
Shoe L Slot
-- Shoe Perspective 1
-- Shoe Perspective 2
etc

So where I have trouble understanding what to do now:

1) IF I want to have a different Shoe, how do I set up the Skin there correctly?
What I did: I made a new Skin called "Shoe Orange" and then added each attachment of the Shoe L Slot be a skin. This way the animation stayed in tact with the different perspectives. If I want to now create a new skin I can duplicate the images in the image folder, alter the shoe design for each perspective and then re-add that to the attachment in the Shoe L Slot, correct? That worked here, but it seems to be not too intuitive. I saw some YouTube video where the whole thing was exchanged. Would it also be possible (if sharing the same bone) to just change the location of the shoe folder? (from Shoes/ OrangeShoe to Shoes/ Different Shoe for example?)

2) IF I want the eye bone to be at a certain position of the Side Head, but at another on the other Head positions, how would I set that up without basically destroying the structure I have mentioned above? Different Heads in one Slot - or is that a bad idea to begin with?

3) The Shoe Skins seemed to have worked from 2) BUT! if I add a new Skin, called "Hat 1" for example, the already used Slots/ Attachments of the different shoe perspectives will get a skin added called "Hat 1". What do I do wrong there?

Hope anyone can help me here!

Spinebot

To set up a character with multiple perspectives and interchangeable items like shoes and hats in Spine, you can use skins and slots effectively. Here's how you can approach it:

Setting Up Different Shoes: You can create a new skin for each shoe design. For example, create a skin called "Shoe Orange" and add the shoe attachments for each perspective to this skin. When you want to create a new shoe design, duplicate the images, modify them, and add them to a new skin. You can change the folder location of the images if needed, but ensure that the attachments in Spine point to the correct image paths.
Positioning Eye Bones for Different Head Positions: If you need the eye bone to be in different positions for different head perspectives, you can use transform constraints or animations to adjust the bone positions based on the active skin or perspective. Alternatively, you can have separate slots for each head perspective and adjust the bone positions accordingly.
Managing Skins for Different Items: When you create a new skin like "Hat 1," ensure that you are only adding the relevant attachments to that skin. If other attachments are being added unintentionally, check your workflow to ensure that you are not duplicating or adding attachments across skins inadvertently. You can manage this by carefully selecting which attachments belong to each skin and using the skin placeholders to organize them.

By organizing your character's attachments and skins in this way, you can efficiently manage different perspectives and interchangeable items without disrupting your existing structure.

NNWW

Spinebot

Thanks that worked!

Concerning 2:
Can you elaborate that some more please. I understand the animation take on that, but that would also require me to adjust the eye position every time I use a different head in another animation. An Attack facing to the side, will still use the 3/4 facing half down Head + the respective eye position of that Head perspective before changing to the Side Face of the motion.
I would want to have the eye basically be grouped to the different head positions. On the Side Head the Eye is more to the side then the front facing head of course.

How does that work? Would there be just an empty skeleton visible when adding the Hat 1 then?

Misaki

NNWW Regarding 2, skin constraints can be used to change the position of the bones when the skin is changed. If you have not yet read the skin constraints section in the user guide, please check it first:
https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-skins#Skin-constraints
In your case, it would be a good idea to change the position of the eye bone by a transform constraint. Since a textual explanation would be a repetition of what is written in the User's Guide, I will give a concrete example: By adding transform constraints in a particular skin, the position of the bones can be translated, rotated, or scaled, thus changing the proportions of the skeleton:

One thing to keep in mind is that if the bone you want to move is one that you also want to animate in the animation, setting the corresponding property's Mix to 100 in the transform constraint may cause the bone's animation not to be applied. So in the example in the video above, I have the following settings:

Since the hips bone has both vertical and horizontal movement in the animations, setting the Translate X and Y Mix to 100 would cause it to not move at all, so I set the Offset value to a very large value and the Mix value to a smaller value to allow for subtle position adjustment and to reduce the amount of movement according to the small body size. On the other hand, the scale mix is set to 100 because I will not be creating scale animations on the hips bone.

I have attached the example project file here so you can examine it:

twitch-dragon-forskintutorial.zip

3MB

Regarding 3 I am a little confused as it is a little unclear on what exactly you mean when you say a skin added called "Hat 1". Could it be that "a skin" you are talking about here are not skins but skin placeholders? If so, note that the skin placeholders will appear no matter which skin is active. You can see in the mix-and-match example that, for example, even if the currently active skin is the backpack skin, the tree view shows other skin placeholders, such as cape-ribbon, cape-blue-up-front, and cape-blue-shoulder-front, and so on:

If the skin placeholders are hidden, you can not add images for that skin, and the information that the skin placeholders are empty for that skin is important in itself, so if showing attachments is enabled, this is the correct state.

NNWW

Misaki : Thank you for your insights!
Maybe I explained it wrong, but what I managed to do so now for that is:
I set up the rig & then did the different directions in a ROTATE Animation.

For a new animation I want to use the side head with the eye position I had set in that perspective in the ROTATE Animation (that has all the stances in the different perspectives)

IF I want to use let's say the side head (with the exact same eye position I had set in the Rotate Animation) in a few frames of an attack animation - then what would be the best way to achieve that? Copy/ Paste the Head Bone in the Frame of the new animation?

Concerning 3) I want to try this once more, it worked with the shoes, but not with the hat for some reason.

Misaki

NNWW Thank you for the additional explanation. To create a character orientation change during animation, it is common to first create an animation that records the appropriate bone position and attachment display state for each orientation, and then copy and reuse the keys from there as needed. The following video and sample projects may be helpful in this approach:
Rigging an 8-direction character for animation in Spine

Likewise, the following video and sample projects would be helpful:
Rigging Helmet