Thanks for the detailed response!
Editor preview of any custom skin re-combination (while not in play mode) would require you to write the respective editor code. Or did you mean something else?
Yea I remember writing something like an onValidate or something similar. Some sort of editor script that'd allow me to refresh in the editor. I remember one of the spine editors previously would overwrite the skin back to its default skin.
I was curious if that had been adjusted so its possible to do what I did before or if there is another workaround to allowing my editor window to show the skins.
With the way I handle creating sprites albedo/normals/spec/gloss I'm thinking it may be best to just keep a bunch of sprites separated within the project with a relevant material and merging them at runtime.
I plan to have hundreds of source sprites (which may make the file size a bit larger then if I were to pre-pack them) however if I'm correct, other then file size, dynamically packing them all run time wont effect performance beyond the actual packing process when instantiating my characters?
What's difficult to think about is that, if I have tons of sprites used for all kinds of equipment to builds all kinds of different characters. To some extent it be very convenient to just have all sprites packed into 1 texture (or rather few textures). However the method you showed to dynamically pack skins appears as If I have to have pre-defined skins with sprites assigned that I merge into one.
So packing lets say 20 different hair sprites into a single texture along side the rest of her body. Or 20 different arm sprites, doesn't really seem possible that way. (I guess im naively thinking I can pre pack all my sprites at the start of the game)
However maybe I'm just overthinking stuff, maybe its okay to leave all the source sprites in the project and just generate the specific textures I need only when I need them. Do you just suggest I do that?
Sorry so much for the long winded questions... I've been studying a good workflow for weeks and have been trying to wrap my head around this. Thanks so much for your help.