How to cut your assets for animation

Erika

If you're diving into the world of 2D skeletal animation with Spine for the first time, you might have come across a common question: How should I prepare my assets for animation? Find some tips to help you get started and make the most of your animation process in our blog post!

Fabiano

Thank you so much Erika for the huge effort in making this guide!
This was sooo needed!
I'll have to remember that this exists now, whenever I need to explain this topic to somebody new 📝

Are you considering a Part 2 with more specific cases?
Like how to divide a light or a shadow from the object it's cast upon, with possible Colour Blend modes, or how to behave with particles where you can use one signle image and repeat it in Spine?

Thora

Give Erika a piece of advice.
The hyphen (-) is not safe in a development environment. The underscore (_) is a safe character, so it is generally used instead. :♥

Nate

Which part that uses hyphen would affect code?

Personally I greatly dislike underscore. It's too large and makes things ugly, particularly with variable width fonts, but I also don't use it in code with fixed width fonts. In Spine projects I use hyphen and encourage it. All our examples use hyphen. The names of things in your Spine project don't appear in code verbatim and camel case is better IMO. 🙂

Space is also OK in Spine projects and I would prefer space to underscore, even with the drawback that you can't see it.

Thora

Nate
In terms of personal experience, it's - better. I'm not exactly sure why, but almost all large-scale projects require the use of _. For instance, Nikke, Arknights, Brown-Dust-Asset, and even Cult of the Lamb are no exceptions.

Nate

It's not better though. Which character to use in your naming is purely subjective. Use whatever looks good to you: hyphen, space, underscore, or anything else. The choice has no affect on code. What other large projects use doesn't matter.

Thora

Yes, so it's just a suggestion. Because I like watching Erika's videos. But then I saw some actual job requirements and felt a bit disconnected. Don't worry about this issue. - More aesthetically and linguistically.

Erika

Ah that's a neat idea! Let's gather some ideas/topics/requests that are more specific here! when there are enough I'll detail them in a new article and link back to it in this one so it's easy to find 😃

divide light and shadow for animation
how to consider blend modes when preparing assets for animation
what to do with particles or objects that repeat a lot
how to prepare hair for animation

if we can find 2-3 more that would be already enough for a second blog post!

Nate

Cutting assets is very goal oriented -- it entirely depends on how you need your skeleton to move. Inevitably you didn't plan for some movement and now need to adjust the existing rig, probably with existing animations.

PSD tags are pretty closely related to cutting up assets. That's a big topic to cover though. 🥫🪱 Still it might make sense to cover basics, or actually skip the boring basics and cover the top 1-2 most useful PSD techniques people are likely to need after the basics.

GerardM

I usually use a 10x10 pixel square image in white just to save a lot of space in some cases. It really depends on the graphic style of the project, but in my case, we usually use flat colors and it works very well.
i.e.:
This door and walls would use a lot of space in atlas.

The white square just below the colors examples its the real size of the "Pixel" image.

So I use the "Pixel" image, creat Mesh, deform the mesh and adjust the color.
This method saves me a lot of space on projects with a lot of spines.

Nate

Yep, that can be a nice trick. Someone even used that to create ALL the art out of a single white square, like you would using vectors. That's pretty cool, if extreme, but it makes sense when you need a solid color.