2.5d Face Rig Ideas

hollietree

Hi there!

I'm quite new to Spine, and have been experimenting with transform constraints (love em!) in a 2.5d rig. It works really well, but I thought I'd mention a couple improvements I think would make it next level.

These are all centred around the idea of creating a master head controller.

1) Bounding boxes for controllers
Maybe the user could place a bounding box, and the controller can not move beyond those bounds.

2) Automatic image replacement according to master controller placement
It would be really cool if you could create big head movements without having to make adjustments - so that the images automatically turn off or replace relative to the positioning of your master controller (defined with the bounding box)

3) This may be a bit of a stretch..but...easy squash/stretch deformers?

I'm pretty sure this must be doable using transform constraints, but I guess I want the easy option 😉

And I guess this goes without saying, but a graph editor for animation!
I also want to say thank you guys so much for the great twitch tutorials by Erika! They are really fantastic, totally broadened my mind about the capabilities of Spine. I spent a whole day watching and absorbing the information like Neo from the Matrix 😉

-Hollie

mfedorov

Well you want magic at this time! Some frome you list u can make with controllers. We wait for updated graph editor now.

Erika

Hello Hollie 😃 nice to have you on board and nice art!

Regarding your points:

some people do this by creating 4 bones to "cage the controller" I tried having the controls outside from the face, ended up keeping them there for the sake of convenience.
Another suggestion was to create a constraint that would limit the range: Range constraints · #375 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor I'll add your +1 there
this seems something that a script would be able to do, ToonBoom does this with lots of custom scripting in fact. We've discussed this and we'll probably discuss it again but there are no plans to add something of the sort in the near future.
My suggestion is to create a master animation where you manually do these things such as replacing textures at the right angle, maybe by creating turnaround animations at the different heights the face should reach. (an example of this: Twitch: Cat with boots - rigging a simple character turnaround in Spine Pt.3 - YouTube )
I may be a bit confused about what you mean since I'm not familiar with Maya, but this is something you can easily achieve by scaling in a non-uniform way the head bone. What would be the difference with doing this instead?

Also awww, I'm so happy you're finding the videos useful 😃 :heart:

hollietree

Thanks guys for the super fast feedback!

I definitely can work around all these (I am used to turning stuff on and off from previous softwares and basically winging it) I plan to make a sort of key animation file with various angles like you suggest, Erika.

I will try scaling the head bone in the way you suggested too, I'll let you know if it works out.

Thanks again!
Hollie