Custom global z-depth

CosmiCat_Arts

Hello, I'm using SkeletonAnimations in Unity at a 45 degree angle to achieve a 3D perspective. I'm trying to create some depth between certain textures. Z-spacing doesn't work for me because I need custom variable z-depth between each texture and I also need the depth to be along the global z axis and not along the local 45 degree z axis. From what I can tell, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this, but I figured I'd ask before diving deep into the custom implementation rabbit hole. Is this something that you'd recommend coding in or is it more of a shader issue? I suppose at worst case, I can just create separate skeletons for the layers and put them where I want in Unity. Was hoping for a more elegant and long term solution though.
Any info is appreciated, thanks!

Update: I discovered the SkeletonUtility component which lets you override the position of bones. It even has a checkbox for zposition. I thought that was going to be the answer but it doesn't seem to let me modify the z position after all. Looking at the code, I don't see anything done with that variable. Is there any way to make this work?

Harald

Depending on why you need Z-spacing, you could set the Z Spacing property to a minimum non-zero value such as 0.001 or the like, in order to not face Z-buffer issues when writing to the Z-buffer. If this does not resolve your issue, and you require a large offset in arbitrary direction, I'm afraid there will be no way around modifying the MeshGenerator class to add e.g. a Vector3 spacingDirection vector and add this vector to each vertex position (multiplied by the already existing spacing distance) instead of only modifying z position alone.

Update: I discovered the SkeletonUtility component which lets you override the position of bones. It even has a checkbox for zposition. I thought that was going to be the answer but it doesn't seem to let me modify the z position after all. Looking at the code, I don't see anything done with that variable. Is there any way to make this work?

Thanks for reporting, and sorry for the troubles! Basically modifying Z Position alone would not solve your issue here, as it would have the same effect as modifying Z Spacing. Nevertheless, you have indeed discovered a bug there, the Z Position property had no effect before. A bugfix commit has just been pushed to the 4.2-beta branch, a new 4.2-beta unitypackage will be published soon.

Issue ticket URL for later reference:
EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes2255