Max2Spine : 3D to 2D Animation Converter

A-TEAM Production

Hello all,

Have you read this article ? :p
https://news.ubisoft.com/en-ca/article/7xfneqJoWr5BvNVp6dyuFQ/ubisoft-nano-squeezing-big-games-into-small-spaces

Joël Deligne gives more informations on his Artstation : :o
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q9mzOP
"It is a converter of 3D animations read in 3Ds max to a 2D animation readable in the Spine software made with MaxPlus Python API and PyQt.
The principle is to select the bones that you want to keep as well as the animations that accompany the skeleton in 3D, set up a camera for the desired projection angle and then just let the tool create a JSON file that can be easily imported into Spine.
The skeleton is recreated in 2D by calculating the distances between each vector corresponding to the root of the bones.
Then the angle and the translation of these bones are recalculated frames by frames to recompose the original animation."

>>> Is there some developers here how are able to create such a tool for the comunity ?

NB: Esoteric could create a dev challenge with little prizes to ask dev of the comunity to create some tools and plugins wich could help a lot all the users of Spine 2D in different ways (conversion between 2D file formats, etc)

I see that the idea to use 3D motions to create more 2D animations is something in the air. What do you think ?
https://magazine.reallusion.com/2021/01/01/3d-motions-for-2d-animation-production-now-a-reality/

A-TEAM Production

Anthoyn

Hello, I'm a front-end developper and such a tool would be really useful! we all ready have a tool to convert 2d After effect animation into native SVG animation you can directly import in your project and it's very light compared to a animated PNG or GIF or whatever not native. This tool is bodymoving and lottie combined.

I recently made a 3d animation in after effects but the problem is that Bodymovin and Lottie do not support 3d layers. I found your topic while searching for a tool to convert a 3d after effects animation in a 2d after effects animation keeping exactly the same visual. It is a 'flat' 3d animation with no shadow or shader. It can be done manually but would take years! A automated version would be so easier!

Do you have some info or news on a such tech?

Nate

There is this tool:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/24328-fbx2spine-3d-mocap-to-2d-animation-transfer-tool-is-out

I explained some of the challenges mapping 3D to 2D here:
https://esotericsoftware.com/forum/d/24565-can-fbx-skeletal-animation-be-converted-to-spine-skeletal-animation/2
Basically making 2D look good often requires a lot of shortcuts that don't make sense in 3D. Due to that, the results of mapping 3D to 2D aren't usually great. It may be better to just build the animations in 2D or possibly render at runtime them as 3D.

All that said, what is shown in the Ubisoft article looks really cool! I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but I would guess they are snapshotting poses from 3D and then using Spine to interpolate between those. They may end up with a set of images per 3D snapshot. That may be a lot of images, but it's still a lot less than doing full frame-by-frame animation.