Hello!

I was attempting to animate Pixel Art by FFD, through spine meshes. Technically, it works fine and is very nice to build pixel art animations and custom characters (through skins). Nonetheless, if I want to import spine files instead of spritesheets into the game engine (in this case, Unity), I see small problems with a few pixels (because I couldn't perfectly deform them in Spine, regardless of my efforts). These problems aren't seen when I turn on the Snap to Pixels option in Spine, but it will obviously don't export with those pixels snapped.

I would greatly appreciate some sort of option where I could automatically snap all mesh points to pixel grid AND/OR place mesh points snapped to pixel grids while moving them. I prefer the first option, of course, because it would save me much more time and I would be able to edit mesh points easier (instead of trying to move mesh points that are very close to each other).

Not sure if I explained myself, but if there are any doubts, feel free to tell me. And if there is already an easy way to solve my problem, I would appreciate any explanation!

Thanks in advance, Spine is lovely!

badlogic escribió

This is actually not as easy as snapping vertex positions to a pixel grid when exporting from the editor. This needs to be solved on the runtime side. As you are using Unity, I let Harri, our Unity wizard, figure out how to do that

Oh, thank you! I guess it's more a Runtime thing rather than an Editor one. I was looking forward to guides for the ruler tool to make mesh deformation more accurate, but if there is a way to do it through the runtime, that would be gorgeous!

I'm attaching an example of the problem I face, just in case it helps.

Yeah... I noticed that most character animations were just similar FFD that could work decently for most of them. In the same time, my goal was to be able to customize them. It works perfectly fine if I export these characters as images. That already saves me a lot of time, so this technique does help and Spine is perfectly fine for FFD Pixel Art animations.

NONETHELESS, I don't want sprites if I can get the skeleton (who would?). Thus, I would need the mesh points snapped to the pixel grid in order to achieve the results I'm looking for.

Here is a small example. I put the character in an idle stance, and get the character walk animation. It works fine for skins (especially for multiple skins in order to choose torsos, pants, shoes, etc.).

Of course, if you could add a pixel art oriented mesh edit mode in Spine, that would be CRAZY. But it would already be more than enough with some runtime code to snap mesh points to pixel grid.

I'm also sharing with you this video to see the problems I find in Unity. Do you notice the small pixels and lines that ruin the final result? These may not be noticed if I zoomed out, however, as soon as I zoom in, the inaccuracies are noticeable.

Thank you Harald!

Indeed, the textures are already using point filtering. I set the shader to Spine/Sprite with the Pixel Snap parameter on. It appears with the same problems.

Do you mind if I send you the project so you can check the problem as well?

I see... thank you! I will look into it, I should have got the pixel perfect camera in the project so I don't find these problems. Nonetheless, I fear that a bone based animation will still bring me small problems in some cases (usually rotating pixels will sooner or later be noticed in most cases). However, I wonder if 9206 verts are a problem for spine projects. Will this be problematic (by itself) if in the scene there were around 15 characters at the same time?

I may be able to clean some verts that are usually unused, but I will most likely need at least 5000-7000 verts for this.