Skinning update

March 29th, 2014

Hello! It has been quite some time since our last update. Sorry for that. So many things have been going on, there just aren't enough hours in the day!

We did a big release to update the Spine launcher, which is what downloads and runs Spine. Instead of being forced to auto update, the new launcher allows you to choose any version after 1.8. This gives you the flexibility to update to the latest Spine when you are ready.

We also released a new, much improved website which lays the groundwork for more documentation, videos and other content. Great effort was put into the forum to make it fast and easy to read. The whole site has a responsive design and works at any size, making it pleasant to use from a mobile device.

Who cares about that stuff though, really? Where the heck is skinning?! Well, the above as well as a few business related headaches have delayed when we expected to have skinning complete. The current status is that we are very close to a release. It works fully, including the ability to combine FFD with skinning (which caused lots of extra development pain). What is left is cleanup and testing.

Below is an example of the provisional UI. The bones are rotated and the mesh is deformed automatically according to the vertex weights.

We hope to get skinning to you in the coming weeks and then we will immediately switch to implementing meshes, FFD and skinning in the runtimes. We know many of you have been waiting quite a while for the runtimes to be updated. After that comes IK pinning.

In other news, we will be hosting a workshop at the A MAZE festival in Berlin on April 11th. Hopefully we will see some of you there!

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