• Editor

  • [Request] A switch to Maya's graph editor

I hope this is not a controversial topic, but having come from a strong 3d animation background, I find it very hard to use the graph editor that comes with spine.

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I find it to be inferior and limiting in every way when compared to a more continuous "shows all keys" graph editor.

Now don't get me wrong, you can get-by with the current graph editor that only shows how 1 key immediately relates to his neighbouring key. But it's really hard to wrap my head around how the keys are relating to each other during the entire animation.

My suggestion is that we move to include a more 3d software style graph editor. Like the one found in all 3d animation software, as well as Unity's Mecanim.

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Their are many advantages lost when you can't see and manipulate the curve of an object through out an animation. For instance. One strong benefit of having such a curve editor in Maya is that on a looped animation, if I wanted to offset a curve, yet still wanted it to loop smoothly...you could simply set the curves to be continuous through infinity, and then select all the keys on the curve and move them over a few frames to create a nice smooth overlapped action.

On the Y value, you can directly see how the weight of an object is interacting with it's environment as it's bounce is clearly visible and as such adjusting the timing is very easy.

I could continue to list advantages lost in workflow due to the limited view/control of the current graph editor but I feel I've made my point.

Thanks

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This is a pretty fantastic idea. I have to keep my curve adjustments really simple because they do get hard to manage.

you 954 in list who want this feature )

mfedorov wrote

you 954 in list who want this feature )

Sorry if it's a repeat topic. What's been the said about this request?

That it's something they, too, badly want.
But that it's quite a big feature, so that it might still take a while.

nimbling wrote

That it's something they, too, badly want.
But that it's quite a big feature, so that it might still take a while.

Yeah I was thinking about this, and the most likely reason is that it's just not that easy to implement.

But having animated my first character in Spine...I can't stress just how much I miss the graph editor to check for movement/rotation wobbles and the like.

It's just such a powerful tool to insure smooth animation with snappy timing!

I did notice that they did include a nice "offset" feature which handles overlapping actions on a looped cycle rather nicely. But all the added features in the world can't compensate for a nice graph editor.

I wanna also suggest that playback be auto-stopped when you go from animation playback to scrubbing the timeline...but I think I'm being greedy.

:$

a month later

I've been doing some due diligence with Spine for my company and I think we'll be picking up. However, I did want to post my support to this thread as its one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, workflow complaints I've had with so far. Please add a curve editor as Rick74 suggests.

I'm also from 3d animation and I have really come to love that spine doesn't do the whole graph. The way it is now is so elegant!

So this is -1 for me!

4 months later

@[deleted]
+1 from me too! Current Graph editor is a good stop gap, but not enough. Spine could benefit greatly from a proper curve editor.

Coming from a Softimage (and bad extent 3dsMax) animation background, a curve editor is super helpful to achieve those subtle animations. The current graph tool isn't very helpful (or so it seems) as it can only do linear, bezier and absolutes PER keyframe. It's not able to show an entire animation set in curves and doesn't seem to create smooth blends per keyframes as well.

I know the Spine guys are super backlogged. However, considering Spine is an animation tool first and foremost, I think us animation nerds would love to see the curve editor being prioritized?
:think:

3.6 is our chance to do many of the smaller tasks we've wanted to do for a long time. A curve editor is considered for 3.7. 🙂

3 months later

I'd like to add my +1 to this request. For bouncy, wobbly, squashy animations I really need to able to edit keys on individual channels (x,y,z,visibility) and graph entire curves.
Any update on when we might expect this please?

Nate wrote

A curve editor is considered for 3.7. 🙂

Since 3.6 is expected soon (a matter of weeks apparently) and as stated in Ability to see other meshes or vertex points?

Nate wrote

we hope to have a much shorter release cycle than 3.6 ended up being.

maybe a couple months (or more).

16 days later

+1 on this as well. Just bought Spine Pro and digging into my first animation, an idle. And I'm finding the inability to see curves across keys to be a real problem.

What is the way around this?

Aside from adding a whole bunch of keyframes I can't seem to find a way to "smooth" the curves so that motion feels natural. Everything feels stiff and robotic.

[EDIT]
Adding more keyframes actually exacerbates the problem 😐. Really feeling stumped here. So many great things about this tool, really want it to work for me, but I feel like this is a real deal breaker.
[/EDIT]

Interpolation from one key to the next either has too much ease in/out or is too linear, moving from A to B then B to C in a very stilted fashion.

The Spineboy-Pro sample has this same problem. Rather than a smooth idle animation, you see it aggressively easing in and out of each keyframe position.

TIA for any help!

Saskatchewan, have you found the graph view? alt + G in animate mode.
Graph - Spine User Guide
It doesn't have the visualization and usability of a full featured curve editor, but it does allow you to set the same curves possible in such an editor.

Saskatchewan wrote

The Spineboy-Pro sample has this same problem. Rather than a smooth idle animation, you see it aggressively easing in and out of each keyframe position.

Which keys do you feel are not smooth enough for the spineboy-pro idle animation? Do you mean the translation on the hip bone?

Nate wrote

A curve editor is considered for 3.7.

Note since I said this we decided to do audio in 3.7, hoping to make it a shorter release.

Yes, found the graph editor... been fiddling with it for a few hours. Just doesn't make any sense to me 🙂. I mean I get what it is showing, but it doesn't seem to be amenable to achieving "natural" / "fluid" in/out curves across frames... no matter what I do, the transition from one keyframe to the next either "drags" or "rushes".

re Spineboy-Pro ... smooth is the wrong word, sorry for confusing things... it's rather hard to explain actually 🙂. The transition is definitely smooth relative to the curve... it's just not natural or fluid. The best way I can describe it is that the animation "drags" or "hangs" as it eases in and out of keyframes.

Consider his idle...

At frame 20 his hip is keyed and he translates "down". As the animation moves to this key notice how it "drags" as it goes through the curve, like he's got bad knees and is finding it painful to push his weight back up to his Idle.start pose at frame 50. FWIW, the animation shows the same "drag" at frame 50.

That drag is not what you'd normally see in a natural idle animation. It makes him feel robotic or as I noted like someone with bad knees or arthritis.

Does that make sense?

What I'm looking for is a way to make sense of the curves so I can achieve natural transitions through the keyframes. The only way I've seen this done is with curve editors like that shown in Maya, or come to think of it Unity's built in curve editor works in a similar way.

I hope this doesn't seem too subtle... but I'd imagine with the current curve editor I'm able to achieve something like this...

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... but want I want is something like this...

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... how can I do that?

[EDIT]
Interestingly, Unity's "Auto" setting does a decent job of auto-generating/computing natural curves between keyframes. Would it be possible to expose this as a setting in the curve editor? If you can see the curve data internally perhaps you could generate such a curve for us?

You can replicate any curve with the Graph view, the difference from a curve editor is only the visualization (which I know can be extremely useful).

I don't understand what you mean by "drag" regarding spineboy's hip translation? Here is the hip translation and first curve:

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The movement is almost linear, except it moves slightly slower at the start and end. The second curve:

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The movement starts very slow for 25% of the time between keys, then changes rapidly, then slows a bit at the end. If you don't like that the hip movement slows so much, you could adjust the curves to get the look you like. The curve adjustment itself is not limiting you, though the lack of visualization between curves may make it more difficult.