Help before purchase

retropunk

HI everyone, I started using Dragon Bones and it's ok. Spine seems to be a huge step up from DragonBones.
I really love what I see with Spine. I am building an app using Starling and I was hoping to get some advice on animation.
I understand that IK is not ready for Starling yet.
I was hoping to find another way to animate my sprites possibly using the different mesh methods or FFD. Maybe even another way?

I've attached a sample png. I'd like to be able to give this star image subtle bouncing, floating movement. Then with the long tentacle arms and larger leaf like points, I'd like those to animate in a way that feel organic. Like its swaying in the wind or under water.

With that description, is this something I can accomplish in Spine without IK for now?
I can create this in Flash but the keyframes output way too large of a spritesheet and DragonBones doesn't feel as fluid as I would like it to be. Also, there is no mesh FFD methods in DragonBones.

Thanks for the advice up front. It will be helpful in my decision to purchase.

Patrick

bump
Hoping to hear back soon

Søren

Sorry for taking a while to get back to you, I've been super busy the last couple of days. However you can easily accomplish what you're looking for without IK. Either by using Skinning or FFD. If you can post an animation of the wavy effect you are looking for (maybe made in Flash) I can probably give you some tips on how to accomplish it.
You can see an animation with wavy motion I made recently in Spine here https://vine.co/v/M9u5pxvLYqK this is not using IK.

retropunk

Thx for this answer.
Does it matter if the assets are created with bitmaps or vectors?

Søren

Spine can only read bitmaps, but you can create your assets with vectors of course, you just need to export as bitmaps.

retropunk

Excellent. Thx.
I'll post back with my fla later today so you can see what we are trying to do.
I suspect Spine will be much better for this.
Thx!

Søren

Cool, I'll see what I can do to help 🙂

retropunk

Here is a test I did with Dragon Bones and also frame tweening.
I started to realize that it helps to have the MovieClips transform points in the correct area for better rotation and scaling.

Still though, I cant quite get the fluidity I want with Dragon Bones. Doing it with Flash only is cumbersome as well.
Plus the spritesheets are huge!

I'd appreciate any advice on this prior to Spine purchase.

Also beloew is the error I mentioned earlier in the Trial version.
Is there another way I can import and test my file?

Thanks

Patrick

Søren

I'm afraid I don't have Flash CC so if you can export it as a GIF file that would be much better.

Regarding the import in the trial version, it would seem that I remembered wrong and it is indeed disabled in the trial version. I'll just make sure this isn't a bug and double check with Nate who is the programmer, but I think it's by design.

retropunk

ok, I saved it for CS6 not sure if that helps...
I will make a GIF too later when I am off work

Thanks

Patirck