Select the mesh you want to be the parent mesh.
Click on the  Loading Image Create Linked Mesh button.
Change the name or path of that new linked mesh.
Done.

You can move that linked mesh to another skin, but not to another slot.
Animated FFD for the parent mesh will apply to all linked meshes, unless you uncheck the Inherit FFD checkbox.
The FFD keys belong to the parent mesh.

Yeah, don't do that. Dropping an attachment on another attachment that is under a skin placeholder deletes the dropped on attachment. This means you've lost the source mesh forever and will have to delete your linked mesh for things to work correctly. Fixed in 3.1.06. Good find! :yes:

Nate wrote

Yeah, don't do that. Dropping an attachment on another attachment that is under a skin placeholder deletes the dropped on attachment. This means you've lost the source mesh forever and will have to delete your linked mesh for things to work correctly. Fixed in 3.1.06. Good find! :yes:

Thanks for fixing that Nate, that's really helpful upgrade. I was struggling with it this morning.

Cannot wait to see the linked meshes in the CCD2X runtime!

It's mostly just protection from a corrupt state. It's not terribly useful to have the source mesh moved to a slot, it just prevents you from losing the source mesh and having a linked mesh with a source mesh you can't find.

Hello, I join this topic to ask a question:
I might be stupid, but how does the linked mesh work?
Can I have a linked mesh that controls two different images in the same skin? (this is about that other bug I'm not able to reproduce now btw)
Let's say I have this doll and I found this trick so that in programs such as Photoshop or PaintTool SAI I'm able to change just one color and have a decent coloring, but to obtain it I need to have at least one level that I keep on top of it that needs to follow exactly the same movements and, possibly, the same mesh, can I achieve it or did I misunderstand the possibilities of linked meshes?

(OT: yes, I just love blue when testing stuff and I'll overuse it if possible)

Did you see the documentation?
Meshes - Spine User Guide

Of course (: that's why I'm asking here.
I followed the instructions to the point I understood them, then tried duplicating the mesh or the slot or whatever. and then the program crashed.

I re-read it 10 times already, will you make a video guide some time maybe? Or is there someone with a big heart willing to post how to have this done?

Your crash is being discussed here:
Linked Mesh Bug

It would help to explain what you have tried, what you got, and how that differs from what you expected. The video only shows you clicking wildly.

You can try this:
1) Click mesh Group 1/hair-medium.
2) Click Mesh checkbox.
3) Click blue linked mesh button.
4) Click the new Group 1/hair-medium that was created (under the slot, not under the skin placeholder which is the original mesh).
5) Click rename and change the name to Group 1/hair-medium-fx. You now how have two attachments that share the same mesh but have different images.

If you drag Group 1/hair-medium-fx to another slot, you will get a message that linked meshes were also moved. From the documentation: "Linked meshes must always be under the same slot as the original mesh. Moving any of them to another slot will cause all the meshes to be moved." This limitation means it's not currently possible to do what you want. A slot can only have a single mesh visible at once, so you can't have two linked meshes visible at the same time.

The reason for this limitation is DeformTimeline, which changes the vertices for a mesh. To find which mesh it should change change, it knows what slot to look in. If a linked mesh could be in any slot, it would have to look in ALL slots for potential meshes it should change. We wanted to avoid that, and to be honest, we couldn't think of a use case for using a linked mesh in a different slot. Your "overlay" use case makes sense, though I don't expect it is terribly common.

Oh... Ok, good to know! For others that might want to do something as unusual as me, I just thought of a roundabout: I'll do all the animations with a merged version of the hair and then duplicate that mesh, then I'll change the image it should be referred to and that's it. It will be a step more but I totally understand why you limited it now.

Thanks and sorry for driving you crazy S: I was just so excited from all these new features! You're doing an amazing job and also really nice (:

Unfortunately a duplicate mesh won't be affected by deform keys for the original mesh. If you deform using bones instead of deform keys, then it could work.

Deform keys can be expensive anyway, especially when weights are used. Eg, if you have 100 vertices and each one is weighted to 3 bones, every deform key stores 300 vertices. If you have 20 keys, that's 6000 vertices. While that is not really too much, it may be a bit more data than expected. Spine will soon show the number of deform vertices in the Metrics view:

 Loading Image

That is the raptor walk animation. Admittedly the raptor has weights spread a bit too much, which is why we are making the Weights view show which bones are affecting vertices more clearly, as well as adding an Optimize button which will clear weights that have very little influence. That reduces both the number of deform vertices and vertex transforms, since each vertex is transformed once for each bone weight it has > 0.

No worries, I'm happy to help! :happy:

For comparison this is how the metrics of the Raptor looks after optimizing with the new Prune feature.

 Loading Image