Advice on bone based animation using third party tools

Solar2D Advanced Graphics
#1

Hi,

I have a requirement for bone based animation in Corona.  Basically, I need to create many animation sequences for an educational app. 

Does anyone have any advice on which third party animation tool is best suited with Corona?

My initial research indicates that there are a number of solutions, but they all seem to be at different states of development.  If anyone has a solution/library, I would be more than happy to contribute to its maintenance.

Here are the tools that I have found so far:

  1. Spine - expensive for those on a budget - latest updates has issues.

  2. Spriter - reasonable priced -  not sure how well implemented this solution is with Corona.

  3. Dragonbones - open source - supports Spine v3.3 export - not sure of the legal implications of using this software if exporting Spine format. 

Thanks in advance.

Simon

#2

Hi.

By coincidence I was doing some maintenance on my old Spriter implementation these last couple of days: flattening the parsed XML, fixing some Graphics 1.0-isms, handling some new tags, etc. It seems to handle the most recent “GreyGuy” supplied by BrashMonkey–which has bones–as well as an old monster example, but I’ve not tested it extensively. I’ll probably be doing a bit more with it before pushing my changes back, but in case it’s useful: WIP

(I now actually have the editor so not having assets with feature X shouldn’t be a development hurdle.)

It’s nowhere near feature-complete, but bones seem to work.

In the near future I’m meaning to add automatic atlasing (and dovetail it to accommodate Spriter’s own, I suppose) so textures aren’t being swapped constantly. Maybe there’s a role for meshes too. Also, bones = lots of number-crunching + tons of tables making up the hierarchy, so I imagine it’s cache miss city under heavy use. From my dabblings in Spine’s code I suspect the same will be true there. If this suspicion seems to bear out I’ll look into tightening up the data structure.

#3

Hi @StarCrunch

I would be very happy to help you test / improve your library.  Basic bones is all I require at the moment.

#4

I checked out your library, and it looks like it will be a great fit for my project.  However, the walk animation didn’t seem to work.  Grey guy moved but with no animation.  I did get the idle animation though.

Many thanks for sharing.

#5

Hmm, if it didn’t work at all, that’s a problem. Or is it just very brief? (On my side, this is the case.) It does look like I have some things to fix up to implement looping, which I suspect is all it needs. I’m not long for the waking world, but will try to take care of that tomorrow.

#6

Thanks for the reply. I’ll dive a little deeper into the code to see if I can discover what it is.

#7

I’ve updated this with looping now. Apparently it was supposed to be on by default, but apart from that of course I hadn’t yet implemented it.  :P Minor subtleties too, so let me know if anything seems awry. I’ll try to polish the project in general a bit over the weekend before moving on to further features.

EDIT : Whoops, have had some (now fixed) Internet troubles lately, so was referring to an offline copy of the spec.  :slight_smile:

#8

That’s great!!  I can see this is going to be very useful.

I did manage to get some basic animations working after tinkering around with it for awhile. 

Unfortunately, your file link above doesn’t work.

I’m really looking forward to your updates.  If there is a specific feature you’d like me to test, let me know.

#9

Hi. Thanks for the testing offer. I’ll see how it goes.

Basically, I’m going for broke and trying to get several things going at once: variables, tags, interpolation curves, points, and boxes. I have such a file safely loading, but not everything hooked up. (Off-hand I’m not sure how much of this is free vs. Pro.) A lot of it looks straightforward, though it might take a little time to hash out. If any of those sounds useful, let me know.

#10

Wow!  That sounds great.  I would certainly be interested in testing these features.

#11

Hi.

By coincidence I was doing some maintenance on my old Spriter implementation these last couple of days: flattening the parsed XML, fixing some Graphics 1.0-isms, handling some new tags, etc. It seems to handle the most recent “GreyGuy” supplied by BrashMonkey–which has bones–as well as an old monster example, but I’ve not tested it extensively. I’ll probably be doing a bit more with it before pushing my changes back, but in case it’s useful: WIP

(I now actually have the editor so not having assets with feature X shouldn’t be a development hurdle.)

It’s nowhere near feature-complete, but bones seem to work.

In the near future I’m meaning to add automatic atlasing (and dovetail it to accommodate Spriter’s own, I suppose) so textures aren’t being swapped constantly. Maybe there’s a role for meshes too. Also, bones = lots of number-crunching + tons of tables making up the hierarchy, so I imagine it’s cache miss city under heavy use. From my dabblings in Spine’s code I suspect the same will be true there. If this suspicion seems to bear out I’ll look into tightening up the data structure.

#12

Hi @StarCrunch

I would be very happy to help you test / improve your library.  Basic bones is all I require at the moment.

#13

I checked out your library, and it looks like it will be a great fit for my project.  However, the walk animation didn’t seem to work.  Grey guy moved but with no animation.  I did get the idle animation though.

Many thanks for sharing.

#14

Hmm, if it didn’t work at all, that’s a problem. Or is it just very brief? (On my side, this is the case.) It does look like I have some things to fix up to implement looping, which I suspect is all it needs. I’m not long for the waking world, but will try to take care of that tomorrow.

#15

Thanks for the reply. I’ll dive a little deeper into the code to see if I can discover what it is.

#16

I’ve updated this with looping now. Apparently it was supposed to be on by default, but apart from that of course I hadn’t yet implemented it.  :P Minor subtleties too, so let me know if anything seems awry. I’ll try to polish the project in general a bit over the weekend before moving on to further features.

EDIT : Whoops, have had some (now fixed) Internet troubles lately, so was referring to an offline copy of the spec.  :slight_smile:

#17

That’s great!!  I can see this is going to be very useful.

I did manage to get some basic animations working after tinkering around with it for awhile. 

Unfortunately, your file link above doesn’t work.

I’m really looking forward to your updates.  If there is a specific feature you’d like me to test, let me know.

#18

Hi. Thanks for the testing offer. I’ll see how it goes.

Basically, I’m going for broke and trying to get several things going at once: variables, tags, interpolation curves, points, and boxes. I have such a file safely loading, but not everything hooked up. (Off-hand I’m not sure how much of this is free vs. Pro.) A lot of it looks straightforward, though it might take a little time to hash out. If any of those sounds useful, let me know.

#19

Wow!  That sounds great.  I would certainly be interested in testing these features.