Okay so here's my problem:

sometimes I like to take a mesh, cut it, and have the part I just cut out blend seamlessly with the source mesh. E.g. there's a sprite that's a head with glasses, I want to cut out the glasses, and put them into a copy of the mesh (with all the weights and animations). If you just cut the glasses, copy the head mesh and change the path to the glasses you'll end up with a very distorted image of the glasses, so that doesn't work like that.

I've been working around this by placing some border pixels onto the new (glasses) layer, but sometimes I still can't get things to work (like today).

Is there a proper way of doing this? If not, can we have a checkbox of some kind to help with this?

Thanks .

This is frustrating.

• the PS script baking layers together happens again (sometimes)

• another thing - selection of overlapping meshes. In AutoCAD you can hover a bunch of overlapping objects, hold shift, then hit space and cycle through them. Might be handy in Spine!

Erikari wrote

In Spine hitting space blessedly deselects whatever you selected, so in case we do something like this, we'd need different hotkeys, will have to hear what Nate thinks about it!

Yeah, but you'd have SHIFT pressed at the time you hit SPACE

Okay, I feel like I should elaborate.

Let's say I have this drawing of an arm.

Then I want to have the fingers on top of a weapon, so I cut them out and place on a new layer in PS, you get the idea.

Then I animate the arm, and when it's ready, I'd like to copy (or even make a linked mesh and place it in a different slot, but that's coming in the next release, right?) the mesh and place the fingers inside. And I don't want to animate them separately, I want them to copy the weights and animations of the arm, but with a different sprite of different size and shape.

Here's a good example of handling this from Adobe. You have your mesh, and then you have the sprite position inside of the mesh. You can translate, rotate, scale, and shear it easily, without modifying the mesh itself.

So I can copy the mesh and replace the image inside. Then place it however I need to.

there's an attachment limit so I'm making another post

As you can see, the mesh is copied and the sprite inside is replaced with an image that's different in size and shape.

Next, regarding the selection of overlapping objects.

You don't have to worry about the SPACE bar being bound to deselect all command, because you'll use a combination of SHIFT+SPACE (or a different one, but this one is quite handy).

Here's how Autodesk describes the feature in case I'm not being clear:

"[...] you can cycle through the objects by rolling over the object on top to highlight it. Press and hold Shift, and then press the Spacebar continuously. When the required object is highlighted, left-click to select it."

And here's a gif showing how it works (not mine):

There are projects where it's literally impossible to find the point that selects a certain object, and since there's also no type-to-filter option for the tree yet (and this is a very busy project, remember? ), it requires miles of scrolling all the time.

Hope this helps to understand my original post .

A linked mesh in a different slot is a part of the solution, yes, but I still don't see a convenient way to solve the issue in my example. How to get the fingers placed exactly where they belong in a mesh that was created for the whole arm?

The way I do it now, is leave a few pixels of the original arm sprite when cutting out the fingers, so I end up with a sprite of the same size. It's a workaround but I feel it's not the optimal way to handle this.

yep

If it's not clear what I'm trying to achieve, I can make a video and show the process and the challenges.

Regarding the AutoCAD shift+space to cycle selection - I've used the feature extensively while working in AutoCAD and can confirm that it's more convenient than selecting from a drop-down menu even if 10+ objects are involved. At least for me.
The drop-down requires you to pick from a list of similar object names, and cycling just highlights the objects so it's easy to just focus on the one you need and wait for it to glow. :nod:

Okay, so you just confirmed that my way of handling is the only was possible, which is nice, so thanks, Nate . At least I know I'm not missing an obvious solution.

Maybe, just maybe, there's a way to tell the PS script to "make a layer same size as this other layer"? Like, I have the arm, then I copy and cut it to just have the fingers, and name them [arm]fingers and the script treats this layer like the arm layer when stripping the transparent pixels? So the result would be a 'fingers' layer that's the same size and has the same coordinates as the 'arm' layer, and it's ez-pz to swap it in the linked mesh? :happy:

Thanks for the instruction, this is definitely easier than the way I'm currently doing it. And no, I'm not using a runtime.

BUT, in some cases I keep adding skins to the file and keep exporting the layers using the PS script, which will overwrite the images that I'd manually create using your method. So I'll have to keep them in a separate folder and then re-write the exported images every time. And if there was such a feature in the PS export script I could set everything up neatly .

I understand it's not an often requested / used feature, but so is the creation of bones by the script, and yet there it is . Some people will definitely appreciate it (I know I would!).

Thanks for seriously considering this and all the answers and hints.

Nate wrote

How often are you doing this? Are you using a runtime?

Here's a faster Photoshop way, and you don't need to hide things to start: ctrl+click the arm layer, press C (crop tool), press enter (crop to selection), right click the hand layer and hide other layers, save the file as the hand image.

Just tried this method and it does exactly what I need. Thanks!