Animator alternative for UI

SwingWren

Hi! Currently our workflow with spine works great as with using the mecanim there is no need to create extra code for playing the animations in each case. But with the UI I could not find any "GraphicMecanim" component. There is any standard way to do this for UI? I need the artist to be able to do it without any coding.

Spinebot

Currently, there is no direct support for using Unity's Mecanim with Spine's SkeletonGraphic component for UI elements in Unity. The standard approach for animating Spine UI elements in Unity involves using the SkeletonGraphic component directly with Spine's own animation system rather than Unity's Mecanim. However, a workaround involves creating a custom wrapper that forwards Mecanim state changes to the SkeletonGraphic component. This method is demonstrated in the example scene Spine Examples/Other Examples/StateMachine SkeletonAnimation/Mecanim Logic SkeletonAnimation View that comes with the spine-unity package. This example shows how to drive a SkeletonAnimation component from a Mecanim controller, and with some modifications, it can be adapted to target SkeletonGraphic instead, since both SkeletonAnimation and SkeletonGraphic contain the same Skeleton and AnimationState properties.

SwingWren

I would not recommend the approach that the bot is suggesting, Is a lot more cumbersome to use and is missing a lot of the animator features. For anyone coming for help in this in the future my recommendations on what to do from easy to hard would be:

Check If there is now an Implementation of the SkeletonGraphicMecanim
Check if it's possible and feasible to move those elements off the UI (so you can use the standard SkeletonMecanim)
Maybe the implementation that you need is enough specific and easy that you can skip Animator altogether?
The harder but more flexible way to do it is to look at the SkeletonMecanim and keep implementing things you need until you are there.

I wish spine would provide some more options for playing animations instead of patching in the animator like that, for simple cases coding works great but for complex ones is a nightmare to try to do it like that and non accessible to non coding users.

Harald

SwingWren I wish spine would provide some more options for playing animations instead of patching in the animator like that, for simple cases coding works great but for complex ones is a nightmare to try to do it like that and non accessible to non coding users.

Thanks for the feedback. Separate animation vs rendering components are indeed planned and will definitely solve this issue in the future. Unfortunately we were held back due to more pressing issues and couldn't yet release the complete overhaul of the main components, since we want to make sure it also fits the threading infrastructure and is thus future-proof, once we introduce this breaking structural change.