Spine - 2D Animations

In editor or from code set TCastleSceneCore.AutoAnimation.

Or from code call TCastleSceneCore.PlayAnimation method. Use TCastleSceneCore.AnimationsList to list available animations.

You can choose a skin at loading, by loading a filename like my_animation.json#skin:my_skin_name instead of my_animation.json.

By default we use the first (non-default) skin.

If you don’t know the list of possible skins: you can see them in Spine, or in our log.

For backward compatibility, instead of my_animation.json#skin:my_skin_name we also support my_animation.json#my_skin_name. But the latter form is deprecated.

This includes handling multiple atlas pages, stripping whitespace, rotating…​ so you can pack your atlases really tight.

We also support "single atlas for multiple skeletons" feature of Spine. You can use it when exporting (it can be beneficial, may allow to reuse texture space better). To do this, specify atlas name explicitly, like this: my_animation.json#atlas:my_atlas_name . This will read atlas from file my_atlas_name.atlas in the same directory as my_animation.json file. To specify both skin, and atlas name, separate them by a comma, like this: my_animation.json#skin:my_skin_name,atlas:my_atlas_name .

You can also work without the atlas (we expect images then to be inside images/.png</tt>).

Support for all Spine versions, JSONs exported by Spine 3.x and 4.x are tested.

Of course, complete rendering of skeleton with attachments, and complete playback of normal bone animations (hierarchy of translations, rotations, scaling). All animations are imported from Spine, and can be selected by TCastleSceneCore.PlayAnimation(...) method.

Animation of slot timeline attachment, this allows to change the attachment during animation, e.g. to make something appear/disappear or for frame-by-frame animations.

Animation of slot color and transparency.

Animating slot draw order (draw order timeline).

Bezier curves for animating parameters.

Support for "mesh" attachment.

Partial support for "skinnedmesh" attachment. The skinnedmesh in setup pose is affected by bones correctly, and during animation it moves as a whole (is affected by parent bone transformation). Missing is the ability to recalculate vertexes affected by bones during animation (that is, to deform skinnedmesh during animation).

Spine "paths" are supported, to use as custom paths for any purpose in the game. Internally they are converted to NurbsCurve X3D nodes, fully supported by the engine — you can render them, or query them for any purpose. They are invisible by default (Shape.render = false), since that is the intention of Spine paths, but you can make them visible easily if needed. From Castle Model Viewer, use "Edit->Reveal All Hidden Shapes" to show them.

Animating vertexes of meshes using FFD. See the spine/free_form_deformation demos in demo-models.

Animating vertexes of skinned meshes to deform them by the bones. See the Weighted mesh (skinned mesh animation) news and spine/weighted_mesh demos in demo-models.

Cross-fading between animations (Spine and otherwise) is supported since Castle Game Engine 6.5

Our implementation of Spine converts the Spine project under the hood into an X3D node graph. This means that Spine animation is a full 3D model, and uses stuff like X3D interpolators for animation. This also means that you can use all existing X3D rendering/processing tools to extend the Spine animation (for example, you can use sensors, texture settings, screen effects, you can cast shadows!, you can use shaders etc.).

Note that you could also create an X3D file with your 2D world, where you insert multiple Spine animations with X3D Inline node. This allows to combine multiple 2D and 3D models already at data level.

Attachment type "regionsequence" (should be easy, but needs test models; in principle, this should be exactly how you can use things like "xxx@counter(4).png" in X3D MovieTexture with our engine, see https://castle-engine.io/x3d_extensions.php#section_ext_movie_from_image_sequence ).

Attachment type "boundingbox" (easy to do, convert to X3D TransformSensor; will need special code to actually use it for something).

Events and Event Timeline (easy to do; note that events don’t do anything by themselves, they just allow animator to "name" some events on the timeline; we would convert them to some sensor that can be watched (using X3D ROUTE) by user code).

IK (Inverse Kinematics). Difficulty unknown, this is a new Spine feature.

We do not support paths for "path constraints" or animations.