Slot Attachment Picker Panel

TheSunOfMan

I often find myself building and animating rigs that have slots with many, many attachments. For example, I'll have a [slot]Hand, and within that are 50+ attachment for different hand sprites. When these 50+ attachments are also within Skin Placeholders, it becomes impossible to preview a thumbnail from these skin placeholders. Basically I find myself clicking one-by-one through the attachments until I see the one I want...

Might I suggest a new panel that will preview each attachment in a selected slot as a thumbnail, similar to the frame picker in Animate CC and other animation applications.

I understand that attachments can be previewed by hover the mouse over them. But this takes too long as the thumbnail doesn't display quickly AND there is NO thumbnail preview for hovering over a skin placeholder without expanding that placeholder to reveal the attachment within.

A panel like this will make the animation process much less painful. I find that I am overly reliant on the Tree Panel as I am CONSTATLY zipping up and down and toggling the filter settings multiple times per minute... it's simply too much to manage.

Misaki

TheSunOfMan Thanks for sharing your opinion! I think the idea of the slot preview view is very interesting.
To be sure, I would like to ask why all the attachment names are managed by number? For example, if those attachment names were Hand-Front-Open or Hand-Side-Close, it would be much easier to manage even with the current editor specifications, but is there any reason why they should not be managed by number?

Spinebot

Your suggestion for a new panel that previews each attachment in a selected slot as a thumbnail is a great idea and could significantly improve the workflow for animators using Spine. This would be especially useful for slots with many attachments, as it would allow for quicker and more efficient selection of the desired attachment without the need to click through each one individually.

Currently, Spine does not have a feature that allows for such a thumbnail preview panel. However, there are some existing features and suggestions that might help alleviate some of the issues you're facing:

Hover Previews: While you mentioned that hovering over attachments to see thumbnails is slow and doesn't work for skin placeholders, this is still a feature that can be useful in some cases.
Tree Filters: Using the "attachments only" filter in the tree can help you quickly navigate through attachments. This can be combined with selecting multiple attachments by clicking the first, holding shift, and clicking the last, then toggling visibility.
Dummy Animations: Creating dummy animations to bulk activate and deactivate parts can be a workaround, although it is not as efficient as having a dedicated panel.
Skin Placeholders: Utilizing skin placeholders effectively can help manage attachments better. You can hide or show skin placeholders in your animation, and the actual attachment used for a skin placeholder comes from the skin.
Future Improvements: There have been discussions about adding UI improvements for choosing which attachment is visible, showing all possible images for the slot, and adding tooltips on key hover to show which image is shown for the key. These improvements could potentially address some of the issues you're experiencing.

Your suggestion for a thumbnail preview panel is valuable feedback and could be considered for future updates to Spine. It would streamline the process of selecting attachments and reduce the reliance on the Tree Panel, making the animation process more efficient.

TheSunOfMan

Thank you for the reply. Point 3 is an EXCELLENT idea for a temporary solution... I had not though about it. I'll try doing this.

TheSunOfMan

Hi Misaki. The names being numbered is the result of a batch exporting of the sprites from Animate CC. In the interest of speed, renaming these images would take some time. Even if my attachment had strong names, when there are 100+ attachments to choose from, those names will not help much as I expect I'll still be toggling through them to find the right one. A thumbnail preview will also help greatly for when I'm animating a rig that I have not made.

Misaki

TheSunOfMan Sorry for the delay in getting back to you! Your explanation makes sense and I was going to create an issue ticket about this, but I actually found a ticket in our roadmap that I thought might be relevant: EsotericSoftware/spine-editor1
However, since it was too old and the issue did not explain the idea in that much detail, I tried to confirm it within the team. We are still in the process of discussing this and will let you know here when we have some consensus.