8 Direction Animation in Unreal

zub

Trying to set up 8 directional movements in Unreal where the animations are in different skel/atlases. Should something like this work where I'm using multiple spineskeletonanimation components for different directions based on input? It doesn't seem to work and I can only play animation from the first component. Here's an example:

Mario

No, the renderer will pick the first animation component and render what it's state is.

You can express the 8 direction animation in a single skeleton though! @Erika and @Misaki can give you pointers how that can be rigged up.

Misaki

Mario A Spine project incluedes a skeleton which can be turned 8-directions available on our Twitch stream archive page, so this would be helpful for you:
https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-twitch#video-FPaqO0Xlh4w
You can also find the videos that show how Erika rigged and animated this skeleton on that page.

Although I haven't actually tried this, so I'm not sure if this idea would work in practice, but if you are using UE5, you could create an actor for each direction and then combine them into a single actor as a level instance: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/level-instancing-in-unreal-engine/

zub

I see, thanks! I'll work on getting the animations into one skeleton, still learning Spine so it will take some time but I know I will learn a lot.

In the meantime, I tried to import the 8 directional character from the twitch resource you provided but it doesn't show up in Unreal for some reason even though it imports successfully. Is there a setting or something I could look into that would cause that?

Misaki

zub

In the meantime, I tried to import the 8 directional character from the twitch resource you provided but it doesn't show up in Unreal for some reason even though it imports successfully. Is there a setting or something I could look into that would cause that?

The 8 directional character uses skins, so the actual look will not be displayed until the skin is applied. (Specifically, there is a skin named boy that needs to be applied.)
For more information on how to apply the skins, please see the following section of the documentation: spine-ue4 Runtime Documentation #Setting Skins

zub

Thanks for the help, Misaki. That worked for me.