Putting spine objects between spine objects

hippocoder

Hi,

I wondered if it's possible to make a character sit on a horse in spine? in other words, I'd like to use one spine object for an animal you can ride (let's say you can ride several different things) and another for the numerous different players.

Sounds simple until you realise that half the spine object needs to be in front of another spine object (or quad) and the other half behind, while still animating!

I'd just like to bounce ideas off everyone as we need this functionality but can appreciate it if it's hard/impossible to sort of do so workarounds will be cool too.

Using a 2048x2048 atlas might allow us to do it if we're frugal with frames (high res artwork) but I wanted to know what solutions or ideas you guys might have?

Thanks!

hippocoder

Nate

You can attach images (region attachments) to a skeleton. For riding a skeleton you really want to attach a whole skeleton to another. An attachment can be anything, so technically you can do this. The attachment would get the bone for the slot it is attached to and use the world position for it's skeleton position and world rotation for the root bone rotation. Just don't key the root bone in your riding animation.

You still have the problem of drawing half the skeleton in front and half behind. Your idea in another thread of a renderer that could draw a subset of a skeleton could be used for this.

This would be a bit of effort to set up, but it would be pretty freaking cool! 🙂

Not sure why you mentioned a texture size?

hippocoder

Thanks a lot Nate! much food for thought, I will investigate what seems easiest.

Steazy

I suppose you could be limited by whatever platform you're using, but I have implemented almost the exact same concept in Cocos2d, which was fairly simple. Basically you created a specially named slot where the rider attaches and then add the rider's skeleton as a child of that slot ( in code ). Draw order should just work itself out, though that will depend on your platform/engine.

If you want to batch the entire composition, you'll need to (practically speaking) dynamically batch your textures together, unless you have a small number of horses/riders in which case you could probably fit them all on one sprite sheet.

I'd recommend tackling the composition first, then worry about batching (which is just an optimization) after that is working to your satisfaction.

hippocoder

The draw call order doesn't sort itself out in unity, which is why it needs to be split into passes. I'll get to that point in a week or so, need to ship an update for a couple of clients first. But I believe I will need to render some before, and some after in order to do it in unity. I tried various overlaps.

Søren

Another way to do it would be to allow some sort of global draw order overrides, but that will require grouping and Nate will probably hate me for even mentioning it 😉

Asterix

Ok, I have this dog and want him to hold up a dead bat.
I want the knuckles to appear at the front of the bat,
as though he is wrapping his hand around it's neck.
I have imported it as a separate object
How do I layer it?

Nate

@Asterix You've posted to a thread from 7 years ago. It's probably better to create a new topic to ask a new question.

You can change the draw order to control what attachments are drawn above/below other attachments:
Images - Spine User Guide: Draw order

Asterix

Thanks for that Nate. I was trying not to start a new thread.
Cheers for the reply. Still confused.

I read the link.

Is there a video of this somewhere?
I expect it to work something like photoshop.
Yes I can place the knuckles in at the top of the draw order for that sprite.
But that still doesn't place these above the Bat layer, which is on top.
Thanks for answering.

Nate

Skeletons are separate objects. You can't mix the rendering of different skeletons in the editor. You can at runtime, but it is limited. Eg, see this thread:
skeleton inside skeleton?

Asterix

Ok so I really need a third skeleton with just the knuckles on it. Correct?
Thank you.

Nate

That's one way to do it, but it's probably easiest to use a single skeleton.