Unity Baking system

Louis02

Hello Spine community!
I'm currently working on a fighting game. Recently we took the decision to move with UFE2 for Unity.
Their system is quite good, but we quickly found out that using Spine for it, can get complicated.
They are using a data asset system for animations, so we plug the animation into the datas and it play it.
At first it wasn't working because it need the keyframes of the animations to be 'read'. For a good while we couldn't make it work, but I found out that baking the animations solved the problem, or at least just make the animations 'work'.
Currently I have to most likely rework most rigs and animations because the baking system, don't bake mesh deformations, is limited to 4 bones, don't work with constraints... ( I have a snake like character using spline)
Also when I bake I have weird deformations occuring and jerks poping.
Is there a better baking solution that is less limited or an alternative?
I'm using Unity 2022.3.5 and Spine 4.1

Here an exemple of weird deformations, the mesh is using 3 bones influence. I tried 2 bones influence and it's still the same.

Here an exemple of an animation jerk, wich don't when in spine, but does once baked.

Harald

@Louis02 The Skeleton Baking functionality is extremely limited, you should avoid it wherever possible.

I'm not familiar with what UFE 2 does behind the scenes with animation clips that are assigned in their editor windows. If it's Mecanim based and generating the controller for you behind the scenes, you could have a try whether using SkeletonMecanim is possible with this asset. Then you should be able to assign the animation clips generated for the SkeletonMecanim controller of your skeleton asset.

Louis02 I'm using Unity 2022.3.5 and Spine 4.1

Might I ask why you're using Spine 4.1 instead of 4.2 with what seems like a new project?

Spinebot

Baking animations in Unity using Spine can indeed present challenges, especially when dealing with complex animations that involve mesh deformations, constraints, and more than four bone influences. The limitations you are experiencing, such as the inability to bake mesh deformations and constraints, are inherent to the current baking system. Unfortunately, there isn't a more advanced baking solution available that overcomes these limitations. The issues with weird deformations and animation jerks are likely due to the conversion process, which can introduce interpolation errors and other artifacts. As a workaround, you might consider simplifying your animations or using Spine's runtime features directly in Unity, which would allow you to retain the full range of Spine's capabilities without the need for baking.

Louis02

Harald it's not exactly a new project, but we are newly using UFE 2 for it, I just update yesterday for Spine 4.2. UFE 2 is not using mecanim, we have to plug the animations files to the moveset so when we export in .json we plug the animations created by the controller. Since it got no keyframes it does nothing once plugged. The only way I found to make it animate was the baking because it create the keys. I found out how limited the baking was limited and I would definetely avoid it if I could, but it seemed the only way yo make it work. After several researches it seems it's a very common problem with Spine and UFE... Nobody made it work so far.

Harald

@Louis02 Sorry to hear it didn't work out. UFE 2 seems to be following a rather strange workflow then if it's not Mecanim-based.