The idea of using SDF (Signed Distance Field) technology for animations, especially for effects like water splashes, is intriguing. SDF is indeed commonly used for rendering fonts and can provide high-quality visuals with smaller texture sizes. Applying this to animations could potentially reduce the project size significantly while maintaining visual quality.
However, implementing SDF for animations would require a converter to transform image sequences into SDF textures. This would involve some complexity, especially in ensuring that the colors and details are preserved accurately. Additionally, morphing effects between keyframes using SDF could indeed make animations smoother, leveraging the inherent properties of SDF to interpolate between shapes.
While this is a promising idea, it would require significant development effort to integrate such a feature into Spine. It would also need to be balanced against other priorities and resources. Nonetheless, it's a concept worth exploring further, especially for projects where reducing texture size and maintaining high-quality animations are critical.
