Hey guys! I'm working on adding Spine export functionality to my character editor - it's not online yet but it's got hundreds of body parts for 4 character sets that you can color, shade, scale, and adjust to create unlimited unique characters. I have a man, woman, alien, and monster set right now. The spine export is fantastic - there is only 1 hitch, I have to add elements to the JSON skins object in the order I want them drawn in Spine - and that means drawing some things before their parent is drawn (like antlers and ears need to be draw BEFORE the head, but the head is their parent bone - so they need his coordinates to set their bone positions). Right now I rewrite the JSON to update w/ the correct positions for these parts - but it'd be a lot easier (and more extensible) if I just draw them after their parent - then add a draw order Object in the JSON. Does that exist? Is there a doc detailing the specs for the import JSON? Here is a view of my app, called Kwippe
I find that trying to prepare a piece of art in Illustrator, then using the script to export, then adding bones and adjusting the images in Spine takes me at least an hour, maybe more. I added automatic bone placement in the middle of each piece of art exported - and grouping for the head, body, etc - and now I can get a totally functioning Spine project in about 60 seconds 🙂 I hope to do a lot more with this project - maybe put it on Kickstarter to get help expand the artwork and options - I'd be really excited to get any feedback here.
I figured out it's actually the SLOTS array, not the skins - that sets draw order. Writing a small fn to re-order the slots was actually not very complicated - and appears to be the best solution. Here are a couple of quick shots of the result in Spine after my 1 click export.
You'd have to redraw the bones if you want a longer bone - my placement is just in the dead center - but for me this enables me to quickly export to Spine for animating - my use case right now is my app to teach kids to read visually, so I'll be animating letters and shapes as well as characters. If anybody is interested in my project please let me know - for now I'm just using it for my own stuff, but I do hope to grow it someday.