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Hi Guys, at our studio we are thinking in start animating by skeleton/bones our next games in order to use less texture size, among other things. One of the options we were researching was Spine, and it looks like the best option.

However, after working a bit with Spine, our artists didn't feel comfortable with the idea of drawing and animating in different applications, among other things. Right now they are used to draw and animate in Adobe Flash.

As a workaround to this problem, we created a flash plugin/script to export bones and spine animations. Of course, we believe it goes against the Spine editor since you almost not need it, that is why we will keep it private. We are wondering if you have plans to integrate some kind of drawing tool to Spine in the future.

We really like the tool and hope it could get better and better, we don't like the motivation of this workaround but it is the best way for us for now, and in the future it would be easier to convince our artists to move from one tool to the other if we are already using spine runtimes. Right now we could even mix Flash and Spine animations if there is something we could animate it better with Spine instead.

Thanks.

Games typically use raster graphics, so drawing in Spine would result in Spine trying to compete with Photoshop. That's not really a feasible idea, especially when we also have to build a great animation tool. We could do something much less powerful, but I question if it is worth the effort when other, dedicated tools will be much better.

Spine watches the images directories and instantly reloads files when they change. This allows you to edit images in other programs while still animating them in Spine. It's not the same, but it may help your workflow. Photoshop CC has features to keep PNG files up to date with the PSD at all times, so you don't even need to explicitly export the PNGs after each change.