• New to Spine

    英語

Mitch,
I am new to using Spine but have years of animation experience. I Love The simplicity that spine brings to the animation process....and with that said...I have the stupidest question in the world to ask you. Can you explain runtimes to me?? Do they have anything to do with the assets that i create and import into unity or gamemaker?? what i mean is...if i create a character, animate him, and then export him out of Spine and then import him into Unity or Gamemaker is their any licensing conflicts?? my resources are my resources correct?? no matter what software I've use to develop them?? I just cant use any art, animation, or code (These are Spine's runtimes??) from Spine, correct?? (except the json and atlas files that were created with the export of my original character and animations). I've been trying to wrap my head around this all day and the company is freaking out after investing money into this program and I can't sufficiently explain this runtime thing to them. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Best regards,
Shawn Todd

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  • Mitch

    • 投稿 #2
    • この投稿は英語で投稿されました

    Hello!

    I'd be happy to answer your question to the best of my ability, but License questions should really be directed to Nate.

    Spine can really be broken into 3 parts
    1) The Editor. You require 1 copy for each person simultaneously using it.
    2a) Exported Images & Data (traditional sprite sheets, JSON, anything output from Spine) is yours assuming it was your work that went into it.
    3) The Runtimes. These are considered part of the Spine license and ultimately as long as your company owns at least 1 seat of Spine (the editor), you can use the runtimes internally in your projects.

    2b) Spine generally exports into 2 formats, one is just standard sprite-sheets like you'd see from any other software. The other is the JSON and Atlas format which is what you need the Runtimes to use (unless you write your own, but this is why the Runtimes are part of the license - they're very time consuming to maintain).

    A general workflow for Unity would be....

    Make a Spine project and animate a character.
    Export from Spine to JSON & Atlas
    Create a Unity project and import the Spine-Unity runtimes from GitHub
    Import the JSON & Atlas into a folder in your Unity Assets/ folder.
    At this point, the JSON & Atlas basically become an FBX file as the importer takes over from there.

    The major benefit of the Spine Runtimes over just using Maya and FBX is that you get a ton more control over things that matter to 2D pipelines... like skin swapping, per-vertex animation, changing parts of the model by actually swapping out a quad instead of just hiding the one you dont need... so on. There is also a strong realtime IK engine built right into the runtimes which is easily integrated with Unity to do things like keeping a character's feet above the ground.

    Anyway, theres my spiel 🙂

    contact@esotericsoftware.com is the best way to reach Nate directly about Licensing questions.

    Goodluck! And, shameless self-plug, certainly check out my Asset Packs https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-asset-packs if you fancy some great starter kits that show how I get things done with Spine-Unity in particular.

    Cheers

    Mitch