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  • How well does Spine animate Pixel Art?

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Hello,

I am a pixel artist looking at modular animation for my projects. As the subject title says, how well does Spine treat pixel art when animating? I know that another artist has used it, but in their videos, the pixel art was blown up. I need to work at the original dimension.

From what I gathered, it sounds like "crawling" pixels would be a major issue (Example (scroll down)). I noticed this issue with another competitor software and their example videos. Is this an issue that Spine would have also? If so, is there a way that the Spine software could reduce that issue?

I tried finding more pixel work done in Spine, but couldn't find much. If you guys know of any more examples, I'd like to see them : )

Thanks!
Wishie

Here's one of the boss monsters grabbed from the kickstarter page (btw, I'm not the person working on that project, just using it as an example):

Image removed due to the lack of support for HTTPS. | Show Anyway

If you look at his shoulder (especially on the stone spikes), you can see a crawling-like effect. I'm not sure how to really describe it without visuals.

The two links you shared are pretty good. On the first link, with the dinosaurs, there's a little bit of it on the big Brachiosaurus, but it's pretty small. Second link I don't notice it on the guy.

I think OP might mean the natural aliasing that happens when you rotate without linear filtering.

This happens because of rendering logic in your game engine, not because of any specific tool you're using to make the animations. (to be sure absolutely sure of what it looks like, you may even have to see it in-game 'cause camera stuff and varying resolutions might affect it)
It's happening to all rotating parts. It's just that the shoulder is rotating between angles where rows and diagonals of pixels will inevitably be represented that way and move that way.

I don't have a lot of experience actually doing pixel art but I'm thinking there are things you can do to reduce the effect. (maybe something about the texture sizes or making some special rendering code.)
IMO, I think it looks fine. It's part of the aesthetic. If it happens too often or looks too weird to you, you can make sure the images minimize slow movements in certain angles. That's something you can easily do and preview with Spine.

Spine would be a really great option if you're animating stuff like that.

un año más tarde

Deformation, the trick there is working with a high res aliased image.

Also, the problem of rotating pixel art has been around since the days it was one of the few means available for game graphics.

The only way I can think of using skeletal animation and retain pixel perfect art would be to render out your animation and then hand clean it, or do it like Vanillaware did on Princess Crown and have all the rotations you will need already cleaned and do nothing of the sort in engine.