simple way to swap out the character texture?

JoeStrout

I'm brand new to Spine, so please forgive the dumb questions I'll probably be asking for the next month. 🙂

Today I want to make a second character by simply swapping out the texture on my first character. My first character is primarily red, so using a graphics program, I just swapped the red & blue channels on the PNG file, and made an alternate version that is mostly blue.

I set all the import options on this blue PNG to match the original red one, and created a new Spine/Skeleton material that uses the blue texture. I thought at this point, I could just set the material of my second character to this new blue material. But nope — no matter how many times I try, the material reverts immediately to the red one.

So then I tried making a new Atlas linked to the blue material. I can do that. Then I created a new Skeleton linked to the new, blue Atlas. But, though it lets me hook everything up, the preview of this supposedly-blue skeleton still appears red. Where the heck it's getting red pixels, I can't imagine — there must be something in the skeleton JSON that's causing it to ignore the material linked to the atlas, and use some other material.

At this point it's clear I'm going about this the wrong way. What's the easiest way to swap out one texture for another?

Note: I did find the user guide section on Skins (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-skins), but it leaves me even more confused than before. It also sounds like a lot of work, and something the artist would have to do on the Spine side... I just want to use the existing character and animations, with a recolored texture. Surely there's some simple way to do that?

Pharan

The specific Spine-Unity documentation may be helpful for you: Spine-Unity Runtime Documentation
This is helpful for the places where Spine needs to interact with Unity. The general documentation is helpful for the lower-level stuff.

In short, the SkeletonAnimation component manages the renderer's Materials array itself because it needs to pull materials from the AtlasAsset based on which page each image/attachment comes from.

There are multiple ways you can achieve what you're trying to do.

You can set the skeleton color. GetComponent<SkeletonAnimation>().skeleton.SetColor(Color.red);

Alternatively, you can also use MaterialPropertyBlock, which I would recommend especially if you anticipate the need to modify material properties other than just color but need to animate it, don't want to make a new Material instance or don't want the SkeletonAnimation instance to share that single Material. Swapping the texture.

Thirdly, you can use GetComponent<SkeletonAnimation>().CustomMaterialOverride.Add(originalMaterial, newMaterial);
This causes it to use newMaterial whenever it needs to use originalMaterial. This is especially useful if you need to temporarily use a Material with an entirely different shader.

You'll find more info in the Spine-Unity documentation.

JoeStrout

Thank you. I created a little script to do it:

using UnityEngine;

public class SpineTextureChanger : MonoBehaviour {
   

   public Texture2D textureToUse;
   

   void Start() {
      MaterialPropertyBlock mpb = new MaterialPropertyBlock();
      mpb.SetTexture("_MainTex", textureToUse);
      GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().SetPropertyBlock(mpb);
   }
}

I would not have figured that out without your help! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.