Swap images with different pivot points ?

SEB

Hello,

We are currently experimenting Spine and Toon Boom to choose which tool could best fit our needs. There is one feature that our animators and riggers like very much in Toon Boom : drawing substitution which is like swapping a slot image but the difference is like for a specific layer Toon Boom automatically filter which images are available and each image can have a different pivot point which is really helpful and really ease the process. I was wondering if that something possible with Spine ?

Thanks

Misaki

SEB This should be possible with Spine. Spine does not have the concept of "pivot"; instead, an image attachment is always a child of some bone, and since a Spine skeleton must have at least one bone, the base point of the parent bone becomes the pivot for animating the image.
Since the bone and the image attachment each have their own position, you can replace the image without affecting the base point of the animation.

A free trial version is available and you can try replacing images with the trial version. You can download the Spine trial version here: https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-download

SEB

Hello,

First of all thanks Misaki.I think I understand the concept but I'm not quite sure that is what our riggers want. My understanding is they want to be able to replace/swap images but depending of the image they want that image to have a specific position/offset in order to fit visually (for example different shoes or boots can be very different in term of size and their position shold be a bit different so a specific pivot could help). Does that makes sense ?

Anyway, thank you very much.

Misaki

SEB I couldn't seem to explain it well in words, so I recorded and uploaded a video that recreates the situation as shown in the ToomBoom video you mentioned:

In Spine, each bone and image attachment can have its own positions. In this video, there are three mouth parts, each with a different position. (In Spine, the translate X/Y value of an image attachment always indicates the position of the center point of that image.) The image attachments in this video have different Translate X/Y values because the center point of each image is different due to the edited mesh hull, although the original images are all the same size. The same situation will occur if the original images themselves are different sizes. Each image attachment for mouth is a child of the mouth bone, and when the mouth bone is animated, it animates based on the position of the mouth bone. In other words, the mouth bone plays the role of a pivot in ToomBoom.

I hope this is clear enough, but I think it would be easier to understand if you try the trial version.

SEB

Thank you very much. I'll will check with the team what they think about it.