Advantages of Spine of Adobe Animate CC?

Spine
#1

What are the advantages of using Spine over Adobe Animate CC? Adobe Animate has bones and many other features of Spine, although not all of them. 

I guess the principal advantage is that there is a runtime for Spine , whereas there doesn’t seem as elegant a method to import large character animations from Animate CC. 

I have tried the new Character Animator from Adobe which is currently in Beta, but I’ve found it a bit annoying to use and it has bugs. And again there doesn’t seem to be good export options - it seems to be mainly for video and so has integration with After Effects/Premiere but not exports useful for app development. 

Any thoughts/comments would be appreciated. I’m going to try out Spine, it may be what I need. 

#2

Hi,

Let me say first that I have not tried or know anything about Adobe Animate.

I am guessing what you get out from Adobe Animate would be a sprite sheet of your animations. Spine has this too, but the far more powerful feature is exporting to the format that the Spine Runtime uses.

While with a sprite sheet the animation will be locked to the number of frames you choose, using the Spine runtime gives you as fluid animation as you want. This also allows you to lower the speed of the animation without having visible frame swaps.

Using the spine runtime also gives smooth swapping between animations. No matter where in a “run” animation, for example, you play the “jump” animation the skeleton will mix between the two states making it look more natural than a hard cut swap a sprite sheet will give.

Those are the basics you get with the Spine runtime. In addition there is stuff like inverse kinematics, being able to override parts of the character (useful for pointing guns) and adding physics bodies directly to the parts of the skeleton.

Hope this was a little useful. 

#3

Adobe Animate used to be called Adobe Flash. Adobe Character Animator is a new application that does stuff like facial motion capture. 

Yes, I understand the stuff about the export format. That is definitely a huge advantage over the Adobe tools. I am going to try out Spine, it looks like it is what I need. 

Thanks for your response. 

#4

Hi,

Let me say first that I have not tried or know anything about Adobe Animate.

I am guessing what you get out from Adobe Animate would be a sprite sheet of your animations. Spine has this too, but the far more powerful feature is exporting to the format that the Spine Runtime uses.

While with a sprite sheet the animation will be locked to the number of frames you choose, using the Spine runtime gives you as fluid animation as you want. This also allows you to lower the speed of the animation without having visible frame swaps.

Using the spine runtime also gives smooth swapping between animations. No matter where in a “run” animation, for example, you play the “jump” animation the skeleton will mix between the two states making it look more natural than a hard cut swap a sprite sheet will give.

Those are the basics you get with the Spine runtime. In addition there is stuff like inverse kinematics, being able to override parts of the character (useful for pointing guns) and adding physics bodies directly to the parts of the skeleton.

Hope this was a little useful. 

#5

Adobe Animate used to be called Adobe Flash. Adobe Character Animator is a new application that does stuff like facial motion capture. 

Yes, I understand the stuff about the export format. That is definitely a huge advantage over the Adobe tools. I am going to try out Spine, it looks like it is what I need. 

Thanks for your response.