[feature request] linking attachments (not linked mesh)

warmanw

The Problem:
When animating characters with multiple hand states (like different gestures), some hand views consist of multiple separate attachments, such as a base hand, a separate thumb, and a ring. Currently, switching hand states requires manually toggling the visibility of every single attachment, which slows down the workflow. ⏳

The Solution:
Introduce an option to link attachments together. Toggling the main attachment on or off would automatically toggle all linked sub-attachments at once.

This would allow for quick, single-click state switching for hands, facial expressions, or equipment swaps! 🚀

I can put main attachment for each hand under a single slot, isn't this nice? Cant think of other use though 🙄

Spinebot

My thoughts on this feature request

I understand your workflow challenge! Managing multiple attachments that need to be toggled together can indeed be time-consuming. While there isn't currently a built-in "attachment linking" feature as you've described, there are a few approaches that might help:

Multiple selection toggling: You can select multiple attachments (use the "attachments only" filter in the tree to make this easier), then click the first attachment, hold Shift and click the last one. Then left-click the visibility dot of any selected attachment to toggle all of them at once.
Animation-based approach: You could create a "dummy" animation that contains keys for all the attachment visibility states you need. While this adds an animation to your project, it can serve as a template for quickly setting up attachment combinations.

About your specific use case:

Your idea of putting the main attachment for each hand under a single slot is actually quite elegant! The slot itself can only show one attachment at a time, so keying the slot's attachment would switch between different hand states with a single key.

warmanw

What a brilliant understanding of how spine works, how did you train this bot? I am amazed.

UI broken

Misaki

warmanw Thank you for the suggestion. I can see how this would be useful.

A common example would be hand poses where one state consists of a different number of attachments than another. For example, a closed fist might be represented by only a hand attachment and a thumb attachment, while an open hand might consist of a palm attachment plus five separate finger attachments. In that situation, switching between poses requires toggling multiple attachments individually, which can become tedious when animating.

One way to handle this today is with a Slider. You can create an animation that stores the different hand poses and then drive it using a Slider from other animations. This allows an entire set of attachment visibility changes to be reused and animated as a single control.

However, I think your request highlights a usability advantage that attachment linking would have. With a linked setup, the relationship is visible directly in the attachments themselves. With a Slider, the behavior is driven by animation frames, so someone unfamiliar with the rig may not immediately understand that frame 0 represents a fist, frame 1 represents an open hand, and so on.

One challenge with attachment linking is that users often want both behaviors: sometimes they want attachments to stay linked, and sometimes they want to temporarily override individual attachments. A Slider handles this fairly well because it can simply be disabled or mixed out when manual control is needed.

It seems to me that the main issue may not be the ability to reuse attachment states, but rather that the meaning of each Slider frame is not immediately obvious when looking at the rig. For example, if there were a way to quickly see which pose is stored at each Slider frame, the workflow might become much easier to understand while retaining the flexibility that Sliders already provide.

Do you think something along those lines would address the problem you're trying to solve?

Thank you for reporting the issue with the “Staff” text appearing broken. We will investigate the cause and fix it.

warmanw

Yes slider would mostly solve it thanks! I will add a bone on hand and link it to slider. rotate it will change between the states