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Spine v3.. this look a good feature to implement
I am currently owns a license of Spine Pro, but lately I've been keeping an eye over "Creature Animation" from kestrelmoon.
Apparently Creature Animation has interesting features like "Direction Force Field Motor" and are very good, look:
@Nate, it would not be possible to implement things like that in Spine?
I don't want to be pessimistic but I think now "Spine" is losing most current software features that begin to implement. It would not be possible to implement things so great in Spine v3?
My point is that such "Creature Animation" is relatively new and already implemented such great things (Automated Animation Tool, Direction Force Field Motor, Bone path, Convert to Pixel Art, ETC) and I think in a short period of development, the two(Creature Animation and Spine Pro) have almost the same price.
@Nate.. again, sorry to be a little pessimistic about Spine , and its development but lately seems to be a little slow. It would be fantastic to be able to see things like that in Spine.
PS: sorry for my English, is not my mother language.
I think it has been discussed before. And the answer was no. Cloth animation is often baked down, why? because it is extremely expensive. The amount of verts and the math that is required would make your head spin.
Motors are interesting, but in most case it's not a feasible solution for the core of your animations. A walk cycle or similar animation typically looks quite poor. "wind" and similar features can make for a neat effect, but its usefulness is limited if you want something more than a simple demo.
Rather than motors and forces, it is much more interesting to use the game's physics to drive bones and deform meshes, which can easily be done today with Spine. Eg:
You are welcome to compare Spine to other products, though this forum may not be the best place for such a discussion. I personally don't find the results of motor driven animation to be satisfactory in general. I do think there is a lot more that Spine can do to make animating more powerful, but it will be built on top of a solid foundation and not just jammed together.
As an animator, one of the most important things is time-saving. And those cloth movements sure look crazy good for the amount of effort you put in them, and certainly better than the cloth animation I could animate by hand after an hour of work. As such, I would not dismiss it as a novelty. If I need to animate a flapping flag or a character with floaty-wavy hair, especially if my game didn't call for an entire physics engine and my having to hook it up to Spine (this task may vary in amount of effort needed based on the runtime), then I'd go for something like this.
And like anything procedural, I think it'll only look as good as how tasteful the user uses it. And to an extent (definitely for low-fidelity realtime cloth simulation), it's only as performant as how much the user abuses it.
Spine is already a great base for hand-animated things, and definitely make for the good core. Motors on top of it would only make it better.
That said, each motor is a lot of hard work and needs to be considered carefully. I wouldn't expect features like that like... super-soon. Spine's got some exciting features of its own coming up!
As for using the "Creature Animation" system, I may be a little biased, but based on its technical characteristics, I wouldn't use it for my main animations either. But I could see it as useful for certain genres of games where animations are more like setpieces that just stand there, rather than actual actors that have to change states and move around.
For reference, the old discussion is here. : New competitor enters skeletal animation
If you want to describe Creature Animation's merits any more, let's do it there.
Thank you, @BinaryCats.
Ohh! sorry!!! thanks you too @BinaryCats