chao_owo I think you are probably referring to the feature of masking by reference to the alpha value of an image, which we have received many requests for in the past, but we have no plans to add this feature in the near future because it is difficult to support in all game toolkits rather than implementing it in the editor. We are aware of the high demand for this feature and hope to work on it at some point.

You can find related threads below:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/25280-%E5%B0%87%E5%9C%96%E7%89%87%E7%9A%84%E7%B6%B2%E6%A0%BC%E8%BD%89%E6%8F%9B%E6%88%90%E8%A3%81%E5%89%AA%E7%AF%84%E5%9C%8D/4

chao_owo Hmmm, that could be an interesting opinion. I will ask Nate why clipping attachments cannot use Béziers like path attachments.

Clipping is done by taking your clipping attachment vertices, if it makes a concave polygon, we break it into multiple convex "clipping polygons", then we compare the triangles that will be drawn with the clipping polygons. Triangles outside the clipping polygons are not drawn. Triangles inside are drawn as normal. Triangles partly outside are cut so only the part inside is drawn. All of these actions need to be done every frame, since the clipping attachment shape can change each frame.

To make clipping shapes with Bezier curves, we would need to plot along the curve to get a polygon, then we would do all the steps above. Clipping is already very expensive for the CPU, so using Bezier curves to make the clipping shapes would just make that worse.

Misaki
I am a video creator, and I don’t need to export my work to a game engine. Currently, I create my work in Spine and export it as a .mov file.

Without an alpha mask, many things become more complex and time-consuming. Is it possible to have a video version that is not limited by the engine? Or, like Live2D, can I export my project to After Effects for rendering?

CDO At this time, we have no plans to implement a feature that is only available in video format. Unfortunately, we also have no plans to provide a way to load skeleton or animation data created in Spine into After Effects. However, it may be possible for someone to write a script to take advantage of the JSON export format to reproduce the animation in After Effects.

I hate to limit non-game engine usage of Spine, but we try to keep features as widely supported as possible. Bezier for clipping could work in the editor and export to images/video, but people would want to use it in runtimes. This creates confusion for users and support load for us.

You can export to images or video and bring that into After Effects, as it sounds like you are already doing. Many users do this, especially for cartooning and similar usage.

We've considered an After Effects runtime, but unfortunately we don't have that in our short term plans.

There are some workarounds, depending on your exact needs. It sounds like you've explored some of these, but found them time consuming. There may be other ways to structure your project that are less time consuming, but it depends on your specific needs.