Everything works quite well, but I am concerned we're going to run into a lot of wasted memory as we continue adding more and more skins to each project. From what I can tell, even if a character is using the elf archer skin, we're paying the full memory cost for loading the entire texture atlas for that unit.

You can manually pack the attachments of each skin into a separate texture atlas, this will ensure that only the atlases from skins in use will be loaded, keeping the memory usage down. If you need to mix and match, you could construct the texture atlases at runtime, but keep in mind that your game engine will need to support this.

However, the issue here is that we lose the shared skeleton / animations. So if we decide to change the archer's basic attack animation we would need to go through and redo that work across some number of files.

If the bone setup is kept the same between skeletons, you can export the animations of the "main" skeleton, and import them to the other skeletons. This would would be similar to using a reference skeleton, although with a few more steps involved.

Is there any way to reference a skeleton from another spine project? So we could have one base project which has all the animations and some sort of default skin, and then several projects which pull the skeleton / animation from that but then contain the skins?

I'm afraid there is no way to reference a skeleton in another project.

I hope this helps!

I have a follow up question as I'm trying to solve the same issue. We are able to separate the atlas for each skin no problem. Our issue is that the JSON/skel exports reference the linked mesh of our default skin. So it spits out an error or just don't work. Is there any solution for this problem?

Hello Joey, you can either unlink the meshes so they don't reference a missing skin, or you can move the sources of the linked mesh to a skin, (in case you have been spreading them across different skins) and make sure that this skin is not deleted on export.

Erika đã viết

you can either unlink the meshes so they don't reference a missing skin

Thank you Erika! I think you've led us onto the right track for a solution. Can you help me with an issue? We are duplicating the skin and making sure to unlink the meshes. However, we are finding that not all meshes are unlinked in the new skin. Is this perhaps a bug?

edit:
I think the issue with some random linked meshes staying in the new skin may be due to unused attachments in the original skin. I'm working with my team to investigate further. I found your comment here that helped me clean it up, unfortunately it removes attachments we want because they have no keys. Still digging!

Just want to chime in to say that unlinking the mesh is definitely the way to go! We ran into some issues with existing rigs and linked mesh so those will be a little more painstaking but I believe the solution still stands. Writing up documentation for my tech an animation team so hopefully we've figured it out. Thanks so much for your help Erika! Ciao!