how to mesh / setup this kind of style

richard

i am working on a shapely character right now. at creation in AI i thought i do the legs just as vector lines and animate it as bezir curves later in what ever programm like FL / AE or so. then i and a friend tryed to animate stuff in AE / Apple Motion and failed hardly. We didnt know spine at this point so far. After some research i bought spine essentials and felt so happy with it. I like programs that are made for a real special purpose. But whats with my nice bezir legs ? the bones alone gave me not want i want here. I thought maybe to try out just for the legs what ever single png sequence i do in another programm? Then i learned what you could do with the new skinning feature what was announced in the blog and again it felt like : this is made specially for my problem - so i got the pro version.

I am super happy with what i got so far but i wonder if i did it simply wrong ? in example i had to the scale the bones after add the weights - because the shape became realy thin - on on bending it became unacceptable thin at the joints. so i scaled the parent bone 0.8/1.2 and it felt better again - but therefore i lost the round curves on the line ends of the png - whats actual ok for my char - but imagine i dont want this effect.

how would you setup this rig / weight / mesh to have a smooth and constant leg what feels like a simple bezir line animated in flash 🙂 ?

here is a runcycle to show the result i got so far

Pharan

Whoa. That's intense. No wonder it looked smooth in that sample animation.

Sorry I don't have solutions for you.

But I do think it'd be great if we had a super-easy tool to use for testing if the weights look good when the bones are bent at the needed angles, paired with an easy way to adjust weights to make things look good.

(on a possibly related note, I recall a demoed comparison of two different real-time skinning algorithms, one that suffers from squishing at the joints and the other which preserves volume better. I wish I could remember what those two algorithms were called. And I wonder if they're translatable to 2D skinning and helps Spine in any way, if it isn't being used already.)

Søren

wow, that is a very dense mesh. If you are planning to use the skeletal animation and not just export image sequences that will be very heavy to run.

To answer your question. I would use far less vertices in the mesh, this will allow for the use of FFD to keep the volume of the legs when they bend. You can take a look at our second Kickstarter video to see the idea behind that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5KbK-YxBKQ#t=200

Regarding the two different skinning modes Pharan is talking about they are commonly referred to as Linear Blend Skinning or Dual-Quarternion Blend Skinning.
Spine uses Linear Blend Skinning which does not keep the volume of a mesh when bending. The reason for not using Dual-Quarternion is that it is much heavier, for comparison Linear Blend Skinning runs as fast on CPU as Dual-Quarternion Blend Skinning does on GPU. I can't however say if it would be possible to have both methods implemented, probably not trivial.

In the future we do want to implement subdivision and it will likely be Catmull-Clark subd. This means a mesh does not get more manual control vertices but the new vertices have their position averaged out to give a smooth mesh, this allows for things like LOD where you can increase the subdivision at runtime if you need to have closeups of your character or lower it if you are far away or the framerate is low.

mfedorov

Wow, i see IK pinning on the video. It ready to use?

Søren

IK Pinning isn't ready yet, but it's being worked on 🙂

richard

hey shiu, thanks for the reply.

yes - i will just use single pngs for now. so you tell me its possible with less vectors. that sounds great but i dont get exactly how. is there any example file you could provide to see how to setup this ? in your video a have seen a flower at the end what grows like a tentacle...

right now i had just your bendable spear ( blog gif ) from the goblin as a reference.

if i try with less vectors - i see unwanted edges in my mesh.

thanks a lot

Søren

Less vertices will give you edges, but you need to keep in mind that things are moving so those edges will be tricky to see. When we implement subdivision those edges will no longer be a problem. Can't say when that will happen though.

BlackCapApps

Pharan schrieb
But I do think it'd be great if we had a super-easy tool to use for testing if the weights look good when the bones are bent at the needed angles, paired with an easy way to adjust weights to make things look good.

Something like the Blender Envelope method for skinning would be great to speed up the process.

Loading Image

Using the area calculated by the radius of root and tip to find the vertices.

Søren

We'll have auto skinning in, it will be distance based not radius based though.