Editor - Attachments' color property in animation mode

Fabiano

Hi again!

I found another strange behaviour in Spine Editor 4.1.17.

It allows me to change the setup color of the attachments in Animate mode only if more than one are selected.
This doesn't sound intentional, so I put it here in the bugs section.

Here we see a region selected in Animate Mode. The color property's border is greyed out, and I can't change it:

I tried with a single mesh too, same result:

But if I select them both, I can now change their setup color, even if I'm in Animate mode:

What I would expect is to be able to change the attachment's setup color even if only one is selected. It's being very handy for me to change it in animate mode, because I'm working on a 8 direction character, hence I already have the different directions' poses stored in animations.
It would be otherwise very tedious to have to enable all the attachments in setup only to change their colors, and then deactivating them again.

Although I also understand that it could be confusing to some unexperienced users, who might believe they're tinting the slot instead. :think:

Fabiano

Misaki

Thank you for reporting! I confirmed that it can be reproduced and as you say this seems to be a bug.

However, as for your desire to change the attachment color in animate mode, I am not quite sure of the need to do so. In my opinion, it is some sort of advantage that the attachment color cannot be changed in animate mode. Rather than using the attachment color change for a temporary change, it would be more common to use it when, for example, you want to have attachments of different colors using the same image. As you mentioned, the attachment color is a bit confusing with the slot color, and I think allowing it to be changed in animated mode could cause an accidental color change.

It would be otherwise very tedious to have to enable all the attachments in setup only to change their colors, and then deactivating them again.

I am not sure what you mean by that. It is possible to change the color itself without showing attachments, so what makes you have to enable all attachments?

I would like to create an issue ticket for this bug once I confirm the above.

Fabiano

Hello Misaki!

Thanks for your reply.
I can't post images right now because I'm on a train, I'll try to explain it clearly.

I'm working on a 8 directions character, (South, South-East, East etc).
There's one spine file with one skeleton for all the characters, so we have many skins.
We're going to reuse the bare body parts images (they're white) across the skins, and tint them directly in Spine to achieve different human skin tones.

The setup pose is showing the South direction.
The directions are achieved, like in Erika's videos, by reusing the same bones and storing the different setup poses in animations. Every slot has all the different directions in it, in different attachments (South head, South South-East head, East head...).

This means that the quickest way for me to tint the character's body parts in East view is to just open the East setup pose-animation and apply the tint in there (thanks to this bug 😃 ).
Doing the same in setup mode would require me additional steps, to first activate the East attachments, tint them and reset everything to South.

Misaki

Thank you for clarifying! If there are several colors that need to be colored on each pose, it may indeed be hard.

Let me add this just in case, if you just want to batch change attachments’ color to the same color, you can use the Select - Visible Attachments hotkey and take the following steps:
(1). Open the .txt file for setting hotkeys and set any hotkey to Select - Visible Attachments.
(2). Press the Reload button on the Spine Settings dialog to apply the customized hotkey.
(3). Switch to animate mode and activate the target pose animation.
(4). Press Ctrl +A, then press the hotkey you specified at (1).
(5). Switch to setup mode and change the attachment color of one of the selected attachments.
Here is a video recording of just the steps around (3) to (5):

Another possible way you could try is to use the Select function of Find and Replace. If each attachment that needs a color change has a name based on a certain naming convention, this might make for a quick selection. As shown in the video above, it is possible to change the attachment color even if it is not visible in the setup mode, so I think that as long as you can quickly select the attachment you want to change the color of, there may not be much need to change colors in animate mode.

Anyway, we will discuss with the Spine team whether we should allow Spine to change the attachment color in animated mode. I will get back to you later!

Sorry for the wait! We have discussed whether the attachment color should be able to be changed in Animate mode. As a result, we concluded that it should not be so, as it would most likely cause confusion and mistakes. Also, it still creates the hassle of having to change the color of each attachment one by one, so we should consider improvements in other directions, such as creating groups of attachments and allowing the color to be set in groups. As you may have known, we have been considering for some time to improve stored selections (https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-editor/issues/409), and color management in groups could be considered with it.

Regarding the bug, I have not created an issue ticket yet for it, as no one seems to be having trouble with it at the moment. It might be fixed in the future version, but I hope you will understand.

Fabiano

Thanks Misaki, always useful to learn new tips to improve the workflow speed.

I'm not sure the Select - Visible attachments feature would help me in this case, because for each character skin I only need to tint the visible body parts (face, hand, forearm etc. not the clothes)

Selecting them with Find&Replace with RegEx would be awesome, but unfortunately, since we're working with GameMaker, we're tied to use Spine 4.0, which doesn't seem to allow just selecting unless I'm not finding the way to do it :bigeyed:

As for the bug don't worry, I understand it's not top prio and it's not even causing problems. It's a very specific case.
At least now you have it under your radar 😉

Misaki

Selecting them with Find&Replace with RegEx would be awesome, but unfortunately, since we're working with GameMaker, we're tied to use Spine 4.0, which doesn't seem to allow just selecting unless I'm not finding the way to do it :bigeyed:

I see, in fact, the Select button on the Find and Replace window has been added since 4.1, so unfortunately it is not available in 4.0. I hope YoYo Studios updates their integrated runtime.

As for the bug don't worry, I understand it's not top prio and it's not even causing problems. It's a very specific case.
At least now you have it under your radar 😉

Thank you for your understanding!
We always appreciate your detailed bug reports and suggestions for improvement 🙂