Hi all,

I have a Spine setup for a main character in a game and have many different animations that I'm pretty happy with. However, I'd like to now add in weapon recoil whenever the "Fire Weapon" track is played. However, if I key in translations to the weapon's bone, this will overwrite the weapon's translations on the tracks below it, specifically the "Aim Weapon" animation (Game is 3D space w/ 2D sprites, with fixed camera isometric look

the aiming animation rotates and translates the weapon to face any direction 360 degrees).

My solution to this is to move the weapon sprite to a new child bone "Recoil" to the original weapon bone, and simply offset the new child to the original weapon for the firing animation. However, moving the weapon's Skin Placeholder to the new child bone breaks it's Key Frame attachments. This wouldn't be such a big deal as it wouldn't take unreasonably long to re-key the attachments for each animation, but the problem is the weapon bone already has several child bones that would have to be moved as well. This will break their Key Frames as well which would be pretty disastrous.

Is there an alternative solution to this problem I'm having?

I'm thinking a better solution is to make the new bone actually the parent to the old weapon bone. I'm copying and deleting all the key frames from the old weapon bone and pasting them to the new parent. All the children bones should remain unaffected. I can then animate the old weapon bone for recoil and all its translations/rotations should only be relative to the new parent. Is this the best solution or is there some wizardry I'm not thinking of?

Okay, great I was able to make the changes much more easily than I would have thought. I just created an empty child to the Weapon Bone, and dragged everything attached to the Weapon Bone to the new child. Easy breezy. Now I can animate the new child bone to run on a separate track during other animations without breaking anything. Thanks!