Spine + Unity. Customizing character.

Ant1m3ta

Good day to you all!

Could you provide some insight on character customization, pretty please?
We have a humanoid character, with different equipable clothes. Some of them are sprites, while others are meshes. For optimization reasons, all clothes were stored as separate images. We used 'SkeletonRendererCustomMaterials' to assign this images to appropriate slots.

But this approach stopped working when animator needed to change images midway animation.

Can you suggest approach we should use for storing and building character clothes? Ideally it'd be something like storing small atlas for each cloth as separate file, but afaik that's not possible currently.

Maybe it would be more appropriate to use skins, instead of 'SkeletonRendererCustomMaterials'? Can we pack each skin in separate file atlas?

Pharan

Please see the "Mix and Match" example scene that comes with the Spine-Unity runtime package.

The script MixAndMatch.cs shows you 3 different ways you can do equips.
At runtime, you can make new RegionAttachments (quads) from Unity Sprites or Spine atlases.
Or you can duplicate existing meshes (with their animations in tact), and then replace the backing image of the duplicate.
This is all done at runtime in Unity.

The trick to making animations with swapping images work is to use Spine's Skins feature. In Spine editor, make sure you animate with Skin Placeholders and not just images/meshes directly.
At runtime, those Skin Placeholders correspond to string names. A skin just returns an attachment based on the name you pass to it. And you can make a new skin at runtime and tell it what attachments should correspond to what names.

SkeletonRendererCustomMaterials is unrelated to what you are trying to do.

Ant1m3ta

Thanks for suggestions. Is it possible to save each cloth we going to use as separate atlas, and then load them they need to br equipped?
We are afraid of using several big atlases, because app targets mobile devices.

Pharan

The example script includes how to pack a runtime atlas, which includes all the attachments in the new custom skin you defined.
This means only the images you actually use will be packed. And all the others can be unloaded to save memory when actually playing.

In that sense, all the pieces of cloth don't need to be packed in an atlas. You still can if you need to, but you probably don't.

If you needed to, you can pack custom atlases using Spine's Texture packer. Texture Packing - Spine User Guide