Thanks for the responses!
I'm very familiar with the few 8 direction tutorials available on YT. If anything, they are a testament to just how tedious the process is for building an 8 direction sprite in Spine in that several of the videos exceed 2 or 3 hours for just a section of progress! I try not to think about the amount of work I've signed up for and have been tempted a few times to learn 3d modeling in Blender, but then realize that would be going back to traditional sprite strips for render output which means many sprite images to account for every animation at each direction, as well as the loss of being able to use the skeleton animation system. My football was built this way as an exercise on the concept, and it consists of 144 sprites (12 frames per full rotation times 12 yaw orientations) times 12 pitch orientations (0 deg, 30 deg, 60 deg, etc.) making it a total of 1728 sprite frames across 12 sprite strips of 144 frames each. Player orientations would be way less but still, my main reason for wanting to proceed in Spine is being able to stick things to bones in-game and check the proximity of objects to specific bones, as well as hopefully be able to mix multiple animation tracks (hopefully, not yet tested), such as legs running while arms reach for the ball, etc.)
The character I'm currently working on is for an American style Football game that I'm developing on my own as a hobbyist game developer (gamemaker studio 2), and the ball object attaches itself to the skeleton's hand bone when being carried by a player, which means to avoid mirror inconsistencies of the ball magically appearing to swap to the other hand when the player faces left or right, I have to create all 8 directions, so that the same bones are always oriented correctly, unfortunately.
Yes, I'm using a single skeleton, being set up in the South orientation, and then having a Direction animation where the bones are translated for each direction, and the skin placeholders are keyed so they swap out for each direction.
I use Aseprite for drawing/assembling and exporting the sprite images. Creative Cloud subscriptions are a no-go for me (I would use Affinity Photo possibly). In Aseprite, it's too useful having layers (rows) and frames (cols) and I've set a series of eight frames in the first section tagged as Direction in order of S SE E NE N NW W SW, and I export each sprite image (head/nose, eyes, mouth, hair front, hair back, body (torso), arm left/right, leg left/right) selecting a particular row and setting the export range to the Direction tagged frames. Aseprite then exports them out named 1-8 (arm_right1, arm_right2, etc.) which I (eventually will) place into direction folders named "s" "se" "e" etc. and Spine pulls from the same export directory.
Attached is a snip of how I've laid things out:
I just wish there were some built-in automation tool to speed up the 8-way sprite process, whereby I only had to set up bones, meshes, weights, and animations for a few directions (front/back, side/side, diagonal) and then Spine could interpolate the information and create the other directions. Not sure how difficult or feasible such code would be for the Spine devs, but I'd be willing to pay double the price to have such a thing!
Oh, I did want to note that I did find out I can choose the paperclip filter and shift-select across all of a particular skin placeholder direction to instantly activate or de-activate all of them, which is a nice thing.
