Hi everyone,
It’s been a while I haven’t had a look at Defold and it’s truly impressive what has been accomplished in the last year ! I’m now toying again with the idea of using it for a small project 
I was wondering what was the official detailed status regarding Spine support.
It seems Defold doesn’t support yet mesh animation or native spine atlas.
Am I wrong to think so ? And if not is there a roadmap regarding theses features ?
Keep up the good work !
Nicolas.
Hi!
Defold supports mesh animation but only with bones to my knowledge, meaning that you can’t animate single vertices you have to animate a bone connected to the mesh.
Defold doesn’t support spine atlases, but it have it’s own atlas system. This means that you can combine a character’s textures and game elements into a single atlas to save texture space.
Hi Mattias,
thanks for the quick answer.
I did try to export the ‘raptor’ example scene which has some bone driven mesh deformation but so far I’m not getting a valid result in Defold. I must do something wrong and I’ll try again first.
Regarding atlas in Defold, I do appreciate the fact that it can be handled solely by Defold itself but for many reasons, including streamlining the creation of assets and pushing updates, that would preferable that one can export a spine scene with its atlas in one go.
Best,
Nicolas.
Hi everyone,
I did manage to get the raptor example scene works partially. Some poses are achieved through a direct mesh animated deformation and not only bone-driven. One my work scene did confirm it later.
Just out of curiosity (as it’s not critical to my project) do you have a rough idea of when direct lattice deformation will be supported by Defold?
Thanks,
Nicolas.
We are not too sure about doing animation that way yet. First it’s problematic both from a memory and cpu perspective. Second some animators frown upon it for how it makes rigs and moving vertices much harder to backtrack. Third, in the cases you need only one vertex to move, you can always solve it through a bone being 100% bound to that vertex only. In order to implement that feature, we need to be convinced it’s actually a good idea first and that hasn’t happened yet.
Hi Ragnar,
Sorry for not coming back to you sooner.
Thanks for your elaborate answer. It does make sense that having direct lattice deformation would/could introduce performances issues and make animation process difficult. Maybe it would be good though to add a small paragraph in the documentation that explains what is supported and how to get the best of Spine in this context.
Best,
Nicolas.
Thank you for the suggestion! I have added a documentation task to our backlog.