Linking first and last frame keys in a loop?

Abelius

Hi people,

95% of the time I make loop animations, so I'm continuously copying and pasting frame 0 keys to the last frame of the animation.

Is there a way to have those two frames 'linked', so every change I make to frame 0 gets automatically cloned in the last frame?

Thanks for your time.

Pharan

There isn't a way to do this yet, but it has been brought up before.

Abelius

Oh, ok.

As there's already a way to declare a range of frames a loop, I thought I've missed some button to tell Spine to do also that.

It would be nice to have that, for us forgetful and lazy people, you know. 😃

Thank you.

Pharan

Here's a link to the original topic: Sync first and last keys for looping animations · #35 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor

Abelius

Just voted at the Trello board.

I see you also thought of this before just in the same terms as me, right? It's a little disappointing to see that the topic is two years old... 🙁

And I don't think implementing that would break anything because we already have the way of declaring a loop. We could work both ways with only using that declaration or not...

Well, I hope this gets a little consideration in the future.

Pharan

I certainly think it's a good idea. But the exact way to implement it is a question.

One of the considerations has always been that exported skeletons should be "rehydratable" into a Spine project.
So are starting and ending keys supposed to be special keys in the json? Would the keys resolve to the same exact heap object at runtime?

Or are starting and ending keys automatically linked key types for looping animations? Does this mean we can/should be able to mark animations as loop animations? What does that mean for the API?

Is it purely just an editor thing? Whenever you have Loop enabled, any changes to starting and ending keys are automatically copied?

Søren

For good measure I thought I'd mention that you can copy keys by holding down CTRL+SHIFT and then dragging the top overview key. Release shift while dragging to make the key snap to full frames. You probably already knew this but it does speed up the process quite a bit if you're doing it a lot.

Abelius

Shiu yazdı
For good measure I thought I'd mention that you can copy keys by holding down CTRL+SHIFT and then dragging the top overview key. Release shift while dragging to make the key snap to full frames. You probably already knew this but it does speed up the process quite a bit if you're doing it a lot.

Actually, I didn't knew that! :p So thanks a lot for pointing that out for me.

Pharan, you seem to have thought a lot about about all possible implications of including that feature that I don't even start to comprehend... 😃

Nevertheless, I think I'm in line with that last question of yours "Is it purely just an editor thing?". I'd say yes, at least for what I want to do, which is only synchronize those first and last frames when I'm working with Spine.

In fact it could be an on/off switch like it is now "AutoKey". We could call it "AutoSync"...: as long as it is activated it could copy every key you create or modify in frame 0 to the last frame, which in turn could be identified by stating its number in the "End" field in the dopesheet. And if you don't longer want that, just turn it off and continue working like always.

At risk of looking like a too entitled and ignorant moron, I admit I'm somewhat surprised this wasn't implemented yet because I don't see it as a deal-breaker for experienced users or a really difficult piece of code to implement, right? :think:

I know things are a little hectic at the moment, just having launched 3.5.xx and still squashing bugs all over, but at this point I really would like if Nate could contribute to this conversation and pronounce me an heretic to be burn in a pyre or an enlightened genius to be worshiped by all of you minions... :rofl:

Or something in between. I'd settle by simply knowing what's the plan for this if there's any. 😉

Nate

It's not a bad idea, as Pharan mentioned we've discussed it before and there are a few edge cases to work out. You can subscribe to the issue Pharan linked for email updates.