Blog post: Finally an update

Nate

Sorry it's been a while, we should do blog posts more often to keep you up to date!

bilalmirza

hey! awesome update, any idea when we will get our hands on cocos2d-x runtime with these features?

Thanks

majzim

Great update man!
You mentioned normal maps support in your blog post. I wanted to know if spine will generate the normal map or do we have to use some other tool like spritedlite to generate that? Also, any idea when cocos2dx will start supporting the new features!

Nate

spine-cocos2dx already supports all the Spine features! The fancy lighting that Unity does is specific to Unity, not really a Spine feature, because Unity does most of the lighting stuff for you. It's possible to do with cocos2d-x, you'd just have to implement it.

Spine doesn't create the normal maps. Like creating the other images used in Spine, you'd need to create them yourself with an external tool. There is Sprite Lamp and Sprite DLight that might help.

cybervaldez

This is awesome! Btw a quick suggestion related to the blog post since I almost missed it! Maybe make it more visible that the unity baking image is actually linked to a youtube video 🙂

Ionog

Great!

One question, are the Unity tk2d Runtimes updated too?

Thanks!

Mitch

Ionog wrote
Great!

One question, are the Unity tk2d Runtimes updated too?

Thanks!

Not yet. I don't use tk2d for myself so they tend to lag behind heh. Most of the spine-unity features I write are things that I immediately need.

Ionog

Mitch wrote
Ionog wrote
Great!

One question, are the Unity tk2d Runtimes updated too?

Thanks!

Not yet. I don't use tk2d for myself so they tend to lag behind heh. Most of the spine-unity features I write are things that I immediately need.

Ok, thanks!

chrismweb

Awesome, thanks for the blog post update! I'm switching to Unity, and the lighting tests get me even more excited about playing around in it 😃 (and thanks for the links to the two different normal map generator tools).

Nice job, and I appreciate the hard work!

cybervaldez

Hi about the normal maps:

Are you using sprite dlight or sprite lamp in the example the video?
Author of sprite dlight and me were exchanging emails and he mentioned that the biggest obstacle is having a smooth transition on the joints when normal mapping, is that still an issue?

I need some advice concerning this 😃

Mitch

Tests were done using sprite dlight. Smooth transitions with normals will always be rough unless you paint them not to be heh.

That being said, I added support for skinned mesh deformation of the normal map by taking the most significant bone for each vertex and passing its rotation to alic's shader as part of a tangent. So in that sense, not really an issue heh

cybervaldez

Cool thank you, very awesome to hear that! 🙂

Rouven

What is the workflow for normal maps?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like we need to take the atlas generated by Spine, use a tool like Sprite DLight to create a normal map for the entire atlas and (likely) tweak it manually.
If we later add an image in Spine, the atlas is regenerated and we'll have to create the normal map again?

It would be great if there was a way to import normal maps into Spine alongside the regular sprites. Either with a file naming scheme, or from a Photoshop file (additional layer group for normal maps or something), and have the export generate a normal map atlas.

Rouven

Nate

If you had your normal maps as individual files, Spine would pack them exactly as it does the images, so the two atlases textures would match. If using whitespace stripping, you'd need to be careful that you have exactly the same whitespace in the diffuse and normal images. A tool that generates normals probably does this.

Mitch

The issue arises in that tools that generate normals don't do an artistically good job and only serve as a decent base layer. Painting inside an alpha mask can be rough with normals.

Nate

If you're using meshes then you aren't using whitespace stripping, so it's not an issue. Whitespace stripping is for the lazy anyway, just do it yourself before bringing images into Spine. :p

Rouven

So basically I create a second project in Spine where I only import the normal map images, making sure everything is exactly like the images in the real project. And then I use that to only export the normal map atlas. Sounds like a feasible workaround, but it's a pain to maintain long-term.

Nate

No, much easier. You run Spine's texture packer on your folder of normal images.

Rouven

Thanks! That's a much better solution 😉

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