Psmith schriebCan the Preview show both Blended animations and Additive animations at the same time?
Yes. Each track > 0 can be either additive (added to the pose from animations below) or non-additive (replaces the pose from animations below, but the parts that are keyed).
Psmith schriebCan the Animation View show both Blended animations and Additive animations at the same time?
You can only edit one animation at a time. You only see how that animation is combined with other animations in the Preview view.
Psmith schriebIf I can only see both of these kinds of Animation through some kind of Runtime - which platform would be simplest to use as a Playback application?
We are working on a web-based suite of tools that allow easy sharing of skeletons and animation and this can be customized to, eg, show a sequence of animations. That will be the easiest way to get started with using a runtime. We hope to have it ready in a few weeks (right, badlogic? 😉 ). Until then, which game toolkit you use depends on how comfortable you are with programming, which language and tools you prefer, etc. spine-ts can run in your browser and is likely a decent place to start if you don't otherwise have preferences. Likely the Spine widget is a good starting point. It is easy to setup and shows a skeleton on a webpage. You can then use JavaScript to queue up various animations with tracks, mixing, etc.
Psmith schriebMy purpose is to merely present a linear, animated story or cartoon.
We would LOVE to better support this usage, for cut scenes, cartooning, and more. What you really need is an animation mixer, so you can specify it to play animation X for this long, then Y, etc. Without that, you have to do everything inside one animation or use a runtime. FWIW, Mišo i Robin is a cartoon series for Croatian TV which was done with Spine. They export video from Spine and finish in AE.
