“Animators hate him! FImpossible Games discovered revolutionary new algorithm to create spine chain animations for animals and creatures without any effort!”
Spine animator is component which animates your skeleton’s spine bones accordingly to movement without loosing any keyframed animation motion. It’s simulating real animal-like spine movement without any need of additional animating or coding.
This component will make your animations look much more real and AAA like without spending a lot of time for making decent animations of walking / running with rotation to sides by your creatures and without spending a lot of money for animator to create this animations.
Hi, I’ve just been trying out this asset. I have a question regarding the offset.
Our creatures have their object pivot point pretty centered, about halfway between their front and hind legs. I understand it’d work better if the pivot was closer to the front, near the front legs, so I tried to use the ‘Pivot Offset’ option under the Advanced Options. However, this seems to squash/stretch the spine. I think it’s just applying the offset to each spine joint individually.
I was expecting it to work by just giving a desired local offset to the object’s pivot point. Am I understanding this correctly?
As you say when you put pivot nearer to the front it often gives better results (not always, it depends from model)
Pivot offset is offsetting just spine bones, it have little different usage (check fillipede in demo), maybe I should rename it.
I was using parented game objects for offseting to front, but you just gave me idea to make variable for this thing but not sure if it will work fully correct. I putting it on the update tasks list.
There should be no difference if it’s used on mobile or anything else, it’s working on Unity’s fundamental stuff.
It’s pretty optimized, in package there is example scene with 200 Spine Animators
working in the same time and there is not so big difference in cpu load.
Added support for physical clock, if you need to have enabled “Animate Physics” in animator, “Physical Clock” variable will make Spine Animator work right with it
Added humanoid demo scenes and “Fockatrice” demo scene (monster reminding Cockatrice)
Added variable “Distances Multiplier” and few others in “Advanced” tab, they can be used to get different results, for example for humanoid spines
Also bew tutorial released on the youtube, enchancing animations of humanoid creature.
Check my article for Unity Newsletter where I describing my way to create this package, also there is extended tutorial of making dragon movement controller you can know from package trailer. Also check your newsletter email if you don’t have Spine Animator yet, there is coupon to get -40% price on this package!
I’ve heard of other people having this problem for the last year, but this is the first time I’ve had it myself. I normally use the old store, as the new one is super bad. Turns out it is even worse now that you can’t actually buy things with it. lol
Yeah, search bar is terrible, many asset authors report fewer sales since the change, some categories are hidden, can’t play videos from in Unity. Only thing I like about the new one is the quick preview thing. VPNs are blocked so people don’t try to get things cheaper by using other countries prices though. Sucks the new store interferes with sales, I have not had that problem yet fortunately.
My character’s armature has a pivot bone that the back and hip bone are both children of. So, the hierarchy is Y-shaped. Is this supported in any way? Would it require a spline animator for both sides? Here’s my armature:
My first test from back to neck (the front side of the pivot) was pretty comical, with the head leaning back and quick movements bending everything:
UnselfishBeneficialKid
Wow, that skeleton can be hard to animate in that way, now it’s hard to tell, if you can mail me mesh with skeleton I could try to find best settings for it, maybe I will need to add something inside code but we’ll see.
Not sure, probably not, this package is designed directly for 3D. Behaviour like that for 2D can be programmed much simplier, 3D is making stuff more troublemaking, but if you willing to you can mail me this rig, I will check if it works and send you result then you can decide
If it should be movement like shrinkage and stretching then no, I think it should be done inside keyframed animation but if it should emulate slug’s movement in different directions / going up / turning then yes, long slug without shell should work pretty cool with that, kinda snake movement.
Thanks for the reply and gif, that snake got me hyped.
Just one more question, can I pair this with something like final IK for matching animations with the ground and my own movement system, or does this only work with your ground fitter asset and movement script? Thanks.
It should work with any movement system, but don’t know how it would cooperate with IK stuff, there could be conflicts of some sort, but then script execution order should fix it. When IK would be used only on legs (not using spine bones and I saw final IK can use them) it should work anyway because spine animator would use only spine bones.
