Hey its very hard to answer this kind of question without details about character cause some characters take 5 hours of work per animation and some take 10 hours, it depends how complicated character is, usualy i charge 40-50$ per animation for human character, also do you provide artwork ?

That helps a bit but please let us disable auto weights and assign all verts to single bone instantly, full manual version that could be switched off/on because calculating weights is breaking my workflow timing, i like to work as fast as i can and when i see simple mesh taking so much time to calculate while i add other bones later without any calculations is a bit weird.I know its possible.

I still would prefere not to have auto weights because most of the time im assigning weights myself, i want manually bind multiple bones to mesh, so all pies are yellow automatically without calculating weights , it takes a lot more than 2 seconds to calculate with 1 bone and simplest quad mesh, i have to do something else and wait until it finishes.I can do it faster myself but there is no way to turn off auto weights.

On that video with hand in spine you can see how it calculated weights, there are ugly verts visible when you bend the elbow, it doesnt smooth out verts enough even if there are TONS of them like on this hand.IT should create very S-like shape instead of hard edged like this, its hard to predict if someone wants to create snake or hand but there could be something like predefined presets for hands/joints or for tails/snakes to choose from when computing weights, afterall how many different limbs we have, not that many.

Yeah and its much better way to animate a lot of things using deformation, i dont need to manually take care of each vert, i need only important ones to move and rest of them should follow and smooth out everything between main verts created by me.

yes, spriter does it very well but its deformation isnt finished, in spine you need A LOT of verts to create snake or tail that bends without forming hard curvers like on Z instead of smooth curves like in S .

BinaryCats escribió

is there any point in binding one bone to a mesh, this does the same as parenting it

Oh damn.. man, THERE IS !!!
i want to bind one bone instantly and then bind another one instantly ( because you can already do that instantly in spine if you have at least 1 bone attached to mesh) so i could avoid automatic weights calculations completely.Sometimes i bind just one bone because i know that automatic weights will be not how i want anyway and i would like to just setup weights manuyally , add multiple bones , no calculations at all and ill do the rest myself.

absolute nobody escribió

I never said that Spine could not bend arms and legs with one image. My issue is with the workflow of the system in place. Auto weighting does not automatically mean that you can start deforming images like in the video. You have to add numerous vertices to the mesh. Then you have to alter the mesh every frame of animation to make the deformations smooth and consistent. This takes a ton of time.

A system like the joint bone tool in the video above would really help improve animation workflow.

I dont think it takes more time than other software but automatic weights is painful right now.
I dont have problems with adjusting mesh on every frame because i know how much weights i need on limbs and how much elsewhere so i do this during setup before animating, i think you just dont have workflow figured out yet.When you work on something a lot of times then you dont have to look how it will deform because you know where to create verts and how much weight bone will use.

auto subdivision would be good to have in spine, because you need A LOT of vertices to deform smoothly and moving them manually is really painful later to fix some gaps.Of course after autosubdivision i would NOT want to move these added vertices, only the ones i created with subdivision, they should be there but unable to modify because there would be a lot of them, they should just follow other verts i created myself before subdivision.
Why does it take so long to auto calculate weights on very simple default mesh with 4 points ? Its really strange and its wasting a lot of time, i have to wait until it calculates attaching one bone to such simple mesh, is there any other way to manually attach entire mesh to one bone without calculations ?
Please change default behaviour in adding weights and if we have only one bone bind to mesh then never ever calculate weights, just attach everything from mesh to this one bone, it will save people a ton of time.Because of this creating rigs takes forever and its quite irritating havin to wait to attach one bone to simplest mesh, while i can attach second bone later without having to wait at all like with binding first bone so there is clearly some bug somewhere, if i can attach next bones with 0 wait and then manually adjust their weight, thats how it should be, i would like to turn auto off completely and use it only sometimes with more complicated meshes but looks like i cant disable auto, button is greyed out.

Hey i usually charge 40$ for animation, but it depends how complicated character is.

Recently finished big full game projects and looking forward to do more.
Some examples:
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I do animations, backgrounds, sometimes music... everything.
My work can also be seen on my deviantart http://bwwd.deviantart.com/gallery/ and in this thread:
http://brashmonkey.com/forum/index.php?/topic/3084-my-animated-sprites/
If You have any questions You can contact me through this forum or: 2blackbar @ gmail . com

Yeah i think its best cutout animation ive seen yet and i still remember people tearing me apart for requesting deformation feature in spine almost year ago, how about that ?

Well theres no easy way to deal with people who drag you and slow down, i dont like it and im glad deformation will be implemented even if it wont be used by lazies, car wipers arent used all the time but all cars have them so...
Im not really into forum that much, just wanted to suggest deformation and its importance in animation, its just answer that some devs tdont have time and make lazy animating jobs for purpose is just begging for revenge from hell .

wow so now i know why theres shitty animated games, because of lazy people. :love: crap attitude cause your work is forever, you wont do the same game twice :no:

Well things look different when you have funding but i hope it gets implemented , too bad its at the very end tho cause it impacts quality of end product greatly.

ugh... 20k $ for implementing such basic feature , im not sure what to think , first goal was half of it, even then it would probably be simple rectangle squeeze. I was very optimistic about spine but now im kinda sceptical after seeing goal after goal after goal.

Will this feature be in Spine one day? Im making animations in other cutout software and im using deforming heavily to get rid of ugly cutout animation effect, when its possible to deform body parts then you can easily fix disconnected joints between separate body parts and bend one picture of entire arm in elbow nicely instead of having 2 separate pieces.

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Some of my character animations can be seen here:
http://bwwd.deviantart.com/gallery/

Most of these animations are not possible to do in spine because it doesnt deform body parts, would be great to have ability to freely deform body part but not only by squeezing rectangle but freely deform it to form flexed muscle for example or bent elbow from one entire arm body part.
Im sure everyone hates when this happens( look at disconnected thigh areas, nightmare of cutout animation):

This can be easily solved by allowing thigh body part to deform on top so you could manually move it back into place repairing the gap without moving bone or entire thigh, thats what im doing in my animations and i often use one full arm or full leg body part not split into 2, so im deforming it in elbow and it doesnt look so much like cutout, deformation feature would improve spine greatly cause now its kinda simple cutout animation tool.
Deformation of body parts is essential for animation cause it creates dynamic movement, otherwise animations are very stiff, squeeze and stretch are basic techniques that improve animations, i hope such feature will be implemented in spine, its really essential.