[Feature request] deformable mesh

AAnddyr · 2013年8月27日

Looks like a really great tool you are creating.

At my studio we are currently animating 2D games in 3ds Max and Maya, but we are always looking for cheaper and more efficient ways to do our animations. Spine looks ektremely promising.

At GDC in San Francisco this year I watched the "Rayman Reinvented" talk by Ubisoft Montpellier. They showed us how their animation tool GenAnim works.

GenAnim isn't as good looking as spine, but is has an extremely useful feature in setup, where you can put multiple bones on a single "sprite". Then they have a cool simple way to cut-up the sprites mesh so it has poly edges right where you want them.

We are already doing this in Max/Maya by skinning the sprites. But it's difficult and time consuming, so if this was possible in Spine we would diffidently start using this in stead.

Check out the video recording of the Talk on GDC Vault. They show the mentioned feature in a short film starting at 28 min.

AAnddyr · 2013年8月27日

Pharan · 2013年8月27日

To quote their blog:

We have a lot planned for the future. Once we get through the Kickstarter goals (bounding boxes and a number of smaller features) we’d like to look at supporting free form deformation, which would make animating really powerful. We already have IK (in the editor, not at runtime) via the Pose tool, but we want to do more by allowing bones to be pinned. Eg, this is great for keeping the feet in place while moving other bones. [...]

I'd love to see their demo of GenAnim though. Might be a good source of feature and interface and implementation ideas for Shiu and Nate too. And techniques for us users.

Nate · 2013年8月27日

Skinning (eg an image with multiple bones that bend the image when manipulated) would probably need to be on the GPU. FFD (eg applying an image to a mesh of 4 or more vertices then animating individual vertices) is a bit different and could be done on the CPU. It'd be great to have both but it's more likely we have FFD before skinning.

Do you have a link to the video?

Søren · 2013年8月27日

It's something we have been talking about quite a lot recently. Personally I've been doing some tests in Softimage to see what kind of control is needed should we implement skinning in Spine, while making it easy to work with and still perform fast enough to be viable on mobile platforms.
First we need to finish all Kickstarter stretch goals and get rid of a large portion of the backlog so it will be a while and like Nate says, FFD is likely to come first unless we can find a way to roll this into a single feature.
I'll put it this way. This is top of my wishlist of things to go into Spine

A link to the video would be nice.

Pharan · 2013年8月27日

Aww. It's behind a $500 pay wall.

AAnddyr · 2013年8月28日

It's behind a $500 pay wall.

True. It's free if you were there.

I did a tiny bit more research, and apparently they have renamed the tool. It now goes under the name "UBIart Framework"

There is a a couple of trailers etc. on You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_QhZYTukac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4ABO8wsexY

Here's the link to the GDC Vault one. It's not fatastic, but they do a 20-25 min. presentation of the tool:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017800/Rayman

Rrchayes · 2013年8月28日

Theres a video we were passing around a couple weeks ago on the animation and scene tools they used on Rayman Legends. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-chi097uV4
It doesnt go in depth about how the mesh works but you can see how the mesh is bending the feet at 3:41 http://youtu.be/y-chi097uV4?t=3m41s
Also at 1:34 he shows how on an leg they added two bones and then drew a box around it which acts as a lattice on the mesh thats generated. http://youtu.be/y-chi097uV4?t=1m34s

Pretty cool stuff.

Nate · 2013年8月29日

Spine was inspired by UbiArt, which was first shown around 2008 or 9. They don't have the nice UI (dopesheet, etc) that Spine does but they have GPU skinning and a number of really cool features. What they are doing isn't necessarily designed to be mobile friendly (eg cutting out regions from an atlas by drawing the bounds freehand).

Pharan · 2013年8月29日

I saw that squishy Rayman running on an iPod touch wonderfully fast and smooth though, if that's worth anything. XD

Nate · 2013年8月29日

Yep, they have stuff that runs on mobile. It isn't clear how much is exactly the same as what is shown of UbiArt. Also they are just as limited as everyone else on mobile, so if they use extra resources for things they reduce the maximum they can do.