Introduction

Spine is a 2D bone animation editing tool developed for games. Spine aims to provide a more efficient and concise workflow to create the animations required for games

Advantage

In Spine, animation is achieved by binding images to bones and then controlling the bones. 2D bone animation has the following advantages over traditional frame by frame animation:

Minimum volume: Traditional animation requires providing each frame of image. Spine animation only saves animation data for bones, occupying very little space and providing unique animation for your game.

Art Requirements: Spine animation requires fewer art resources, which can save you more manpower and resources to better invest in game development.

Smoothness: Spine animation uses a difference algorithm to calculate intermediate frames, which ensures that your animation always maintains a smooth effect.

Equipment attachment: Image binding on bones to achieve animation. If you need equipment that can easily change characters to meet different needs. Even changing the appearance of characters to achieve the effect of animation reuse.

Blending: Animation can be blended between animations. For example, a character can shoot, walk, run, jump, or swim.

Program animation: Skeletons can be controlled through code, such as following mouse shots, staring at enemies, or leaning forward when climbing hills.

Function

Dope Sheet: Dope Sheet is the most crucial part of the animation production process. This includes all important details, allowing for animation creation and fine-tuning of the timeline.

Curve Editor: In the curve editor, you can control the difference between two frames by adjusting the Bezier curve to achieve lifelike animation effects.

Reverse Dynamics Tool: The pose tool can easily adjust poses using reverse dynamics.

Skin: Skin can switch image materials for well crafted animations. Reuse animation by changing the images attached to the bones.

Bounding box: Bounding boxes can be attached to bones and move with them. It is mainly used for collision detection and physical integration.

Mesh: allows you to customize polygons within rectangular boundaries. This will improve the spatial utilization of the final texture map set, as pixels outside the polygon will be ignored, making this optimization particularly important for mobile devices. Another function of the mesh is to support free deformation and skinning.

Free Form Deformation: Free Form Deformation, also known as FFD, is the abbreviation for Free Form Deformation, which allows you to deform images by moving grid points. FFD can achieve grid functions such as stretching, squeezing, bending, bouncing, and other functions that rectangular images cannot achieve.

Skin: Skin allows the attachment of specified points in the mesh to specified bones. Then the additional points will move with the bone, and the mesh will automatically deform accordingly. Now you can use bone movements to control the character's image for bending and deformation.

Output format: Spine can export animations from a project to JSON or binary format files, which can be perfectly reproduced in the Spine runtime library. Spine can also export GIF animations, PNG or JPG sequence diagrams, as well as AVI or QuickTime video files.

Import: Spine searches for and imports data files generated by other tools through a path, which can identify JSON or binary format data that meets the requirements. Skeletons and animations can also be imported from other Spine projects.

Texture packaging: Spine can package images into a texture atlas, which can improve your rendering efficiency in the game. Spine's texture mapping packaging tool has many functions such as peeling off blank areas, rotating, automatic scaling, and so on... (The main purpose is to fully utilize space)