Hey guys, we've just finished putting Spine through it's paces, to see if it made sense for to us in our Pixel Art workflow.
While it was definitely usable, there's a few issues which slowed down the workflow.
For reference, we're creating something like this:
Issues were:
Hard to line up pieces without pixel snapping.
While the export script works great from Photoshop for initial setup, there is no easy way to add on new pieces and have them snap to the correct positions. You end up having to type numbers into a text field, and do quick division math, when it should be as easy as holding alt and dragging the image into the right position.
Dopesheet keeps trying to interpolate sub-pixel changes
You need to set playback to "Stepped" in order to prevent the animation from interpolating sub-pixels. But this setting is not persistent, so you must open "Playback" and click Stepped every time you launch the app. This gets annoying pretty quick.
Can't adjust Framerate for each animation
Our animations run at varying frame rates. Some things are like 4fps (like a slow moving background plant), and some may be as high as 15fps. Nothing is close to the 30fps that spine is defaulted to. It would be ideal to be able to set the FPS for each animation, or at least globally for the entire project. Currently, you can only set Playback > Speed, which works in a pinch, but is not very precise. Also, just like the "Stepped" option, the speed is not saved between app sessions, so you must set it each time.
One idea to fix this, this would be a "Pixel Perfect" setting, which would do the following:
- All images/bones would be snapped to half pixels, this would allow us to easily position both odd-width and even-width images, using the default center origin point. In the case of a rotated bone this would be disabled.
- Timeline defaults to "stepped" mode always
For now we're going to stick to Photoshop for animation, as there's too many prickly bits to the workflow. It looks amazing for full-scale high fidelity artwork, would be great to get a little more polish for the pixel nazis in the house 🙂
