Hi,
So, against my advice (my advice being important as I am the expert on spine and integration of spine into engines) the company I work for, has started to go down a path of creating assets "efficiently". Previously, all characters* had their own skeletons, This meant the characters had a lot of character to them, each one would move in a different way (this adds a lot because of the content of the game).
Now the company has decided to ... condense them into 2-3 skeletons (short, normal, tall) and skin the characters onto those skeletons. The reason for this was primarily because adding new animations was laborious. For example If you wanted 40 characters to have a dance animation, the animation would have to be created on each skeleton 40 times. which can consume quite a lot of time for the animators.
However, I fear , and we are already lightly experiencing this, Characters will need custom animations for their character. for example, a character holding a cake :cake: will need different movement animations (because he is holding a cake) and other unique animations (there are a lot of instances like this).
Additionally, I think the characters that use the base animations, would loose, um... character. The character line-up now is great, I love it, there is so much personality in the characters, the way they walk, the way they are idle. For instance, an old man, would walk vastly differently to a Playboy Philanthropist . Having an old man walk with the same swagger would, at least in my opinion, would look bad. (old man vs Playboy Philanthropist is a comparable between any of our characters).
So, sure, now lets say these 40 characters have their own animation set, so they don't lose any personality. 3 animations(this is a very conservative guess) for 20 characters, (say a couple can re-use each others anims) is still 60 animations, that's not to mention base animations. Which is just going to clutter the workspace. A solution to this may be to put each character into its own project file or if it uses the same animations, make it a skin in that project, making a lot easier to manage. You could then import any additional animations (as the skeleton would be the same for all characters) without having to recreate it.
So using this solution, you are to make unique animation
sets for each character group
(character group
, are characters that have the same animations) , and those character groups have unique skins
. And each character group
would be in its own project. This is where my problem comes in:
Is it really that much of a hassle to have different, unique skeleton
for each of the character group
s as you will have to re-animate it anyway. This will allow you not to be constrained by the default skeleton, which is spread across all characters. Allowing you to make the old man have a hunched back, and the Playboy Philanthropist stand tall. I understand to add, say, a dance animation to all character group
s would take more time, but would not being limited buy a generic skeleton worth it? I would argue it is.
One downside of having character group
s with a unique skeleton
s is you could potentially have more projects, if they did not have unique skeletons
as the latter would group together easier.
I am interested to hear what you think, before I approach my boss again.
Thanks,
BC
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