Different skins, different animations

Sod4

Hi everyone!

I'm working on a wizard character who uses magical orbs that orbit around them. The character has 5 different skins, and each skin adds one additional orb — so Skin 1 has one orb, Skin 2 has two, and so on up to five orbs.

All the orbs share the same animation and particle system, and they move along an elliptical path around the character using constraints. That part is working fine.

The challenge I'm facing is that as the number of orbs increases with each skin, the spacing between them needs to adjust so they remain evenly distributed along the path. Is there a way to dynamically change the spacing (or positions) of the orbs per skin, without having to create separate animations for each skin?

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Spinebot

To dynamically adjust the spacing of the orbs for each skin without creating separate animations, you can use skin constraints or path constraints. You can configure the path constraint to affect the bones in various ways, such as using chain scale with the spacing set to a percentage. In Spine 4.0, proportional spacing can achieve this without manual calculations. Alternatively, you can adjust the scaleX for the bones in the animation to make them longer and use length spacing for the constraint. This approach allows you to maintain a single animation while adjusting the spacing dynamically based on the number of orbs in each skin.

Erika

Yes skin constraints may be a good option. In this case you'd have to create a new constraint for each skin and add it to said skin so it's only calculated when that skin is active.

Or a simpler method could be to just not attach any image for the lower tiers so you have all 5, but first tier only uses the middle orb, second tier only uses orb 2 and 4, third tier uses orbs 1,3,5; 4th tier may be the ugly one, maybe the first or last are skipped in the skins hmm, and 5 shows them all.