New Spriter 2 Alpha Build - Video Tutorials and various bug fixes

[lucid]

Hello everyone.  Today's build includes one of our most frequent requests recently, video tutorials. 

In our last video, we said tutorials would be loaded from YouTube, but we ended up switching to playing directly off the hard drive.  The videos will be highly compressed, so it shouldn't affect the download size too significantly per update.  We ran into some issues with the YouTube player when creating the final build which aren't a priority to fix at the moment, as they only affected YouTube playback.  It also has the advantage that videos start faster.  

There are also a number of small enhancements and bug fixes. 

Here is the first tutorial video:

The in-program version of the video doesn't have the music (or any sound), as we wanted the tutorial to be something that would be comfortable to have looping while working (on a related note, the video playback has momentary flicker each time the video loops, we will fix this in a future build).  We used extra large text to make it possible to follow the tutorial even when it's in a very small corner of your workspace:

0.0.0.27

Change Log

Additions

• Added tutorial playback ability and first tutorial

 

Changes and Enhancements

• Improved triangulation algorithm
• improved background contrasting with pop up menu icons
• Added text labels to pop-up menu icons
• Added additional padding to automatic rigging zones to reduce missing verts
• Multiple performance optimizations

 

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug where some clicks on deformer control lines would be ignored and deselect all
• Fixed bug where clicking on bezier ligament adjustment would sometimes be ignored and deselect all
• Several small tweaks and bug fixes related to which objects should take precedence when clicked while close or overlapping
• Fixed bug where 'deformers' icon would sometimes appear disabled even when available
• Fixed a bug where confirming one mesh would also confirm any other unconfirmed meshes
• Fixed visual bug where rigging lines would appear over some ui elements
• Fixed visual bug where one of the control points for the ligament would lag behind when doing IK
• Fixed visual bugs where new bones and meshes would appear in the wrong spot for a frame before reverting to the correct position
• Fixed visual bug where newly created bones would appear facing to the right before angling toward the pointer
• Fixed bug that created duplicate z-order items
• Fixed bug that created duplicate z-order items
• Fixed bug that stopped z-order changes from applying properly
• Fixed bug where rigging zone shapes would show up in z-order

 

Known Issues

• Meshes above a certain number of verts cause pin deformer to fail and leave the program in an unstable state
• Undo and Redo don't always function correctly with the new features
• Visual bug when dragging out new images. Sometimes image disappears momentarily
• Double entries for images in z-order
• Changes to z-order in rigging mode not reflected in animation
• Occasional visual glitches while editing animations
• Save and Load not working reliably in all situations
• Images saved from certain image editors will acquire artifacts when they have antialiased edges where the alpha isn't fully opaque or transparent. These issues aren't exclusive to Spriter 2 and will affect any game engine that doesn't preprocess them. These pre-processing functions will be introduced in a future version, and can be ignored for now.
• Dragging out more than one of the same image doesn't function correctly.

 

 

 

 

 

[Gjergji]

Great work. I like the clean, made for productivity,  look.
Good luck you guys.
 

[bwwd]

Ok i gave it a try, its shaping up nicely, similar to first spriter with B and alt.

Id change naming to "bone" not "new bone" and make it autonumber itself incrementally, i dont need to put names of the bones if its simple 3 bones object, currently theres 3 bones each named "new bone" .should be bone1 ,2 and 3, "new" is not needed , too long, save space on canvas, it can be an issue also font might be too big.

Cant save or open other projects, but these are obvious so...

undo is ruining everything.mesh becomes a mess.So testing it is nerve wrecking, every mistake is punishable by forcing to quit redoing everything again and im patient guy.

Wheres save ? load ? its scary gui at the moment.at least let me save whatever i have or version of it or not save it.IMO diving away from typicl gui is not a good thing, your user will feel lost but i get its beta, still its such basic foundation to every software, should be somewhere.

ok i pressed undo again... ok im done for today, its just not funny.

[lucid]

3 hours ago, bwwd said:

Ok i gave it a try, its shaping up nicely, similar to first spriter with B and alt.

Id change naming to "bone" not "new bone" and make it autonumber itself incrementally, i dont need to put names of the bones if its simple 3 bones object, currently theres 3 bones each named "new bone" .should be bone1 ,2 and 3, "new" is not needed , too long, save space on canvas, it can be an issue also font might be too big.

Cant save or open other projects, but these are obvious so...

undo is ruining everything.mesh becomes a mess.So testing it is nerve wrecking, every mistake is punishable by forcing to quit redoing everything again and im patient guy.

Wheres save ? load ? its scary gui at the moment.at least let me save whatever i have or version of it or not save it.IMO diving away from typicl gui is not a good thing, your user will feel lost but i get its beta, still its such basic foundation to every software, should be somewhere.

ok i pressed undo again... ok im done for today, its just not funny.

There will be more gui items in the final product, but you can save for now with Ctrl-S, though it shares some issues with undo.  I also noticed some of the mesh undo issues just before release.  I will see what I can do about those for next build.

[bwwd]

Ah so i can save but theres nothing onscreen that indicates that, so its hidden , well then i assume it doesnt exist and not even look for it, im not sure if other people are doing this as well but first experiences with gui can tell a lot of whats possible so i can feel "safer" cause i know for example that i can save and load.

Its pretty simple to test every new feature like that, just let someone new open this beta and tell him to save then watch what happens.Yeah... 

So that video tutorial helped me a lot, like A LOT.I hope there will be more of that.Yup hold my hand like 2 years old cause theres new stuff and i need example .

Its kinda like transforming your first transformer figure without any instructions, you can break some stuff if youre not careful and it will be irritating but once you did it  3 or 3 times or youve seen someone else do it, it gets better.

So, spriter1 is easy for me now and i work fast with it but i totally get if people feel lost when working with skins even tho i dont have this feeling anymore since like 3 years.

I know its a lot to take care of at once, but i have to admit that 0.18 was the last one i tried and now this one, cause first spriter works perfectly fine for me and until 2nd one will have timeline and shortcuts in place i can think about switching, i like shortcuts to jump from keyframe to keyframe so i hope that will make way soon.

From what i see theres gonna be stuff thats in first spriter so ill keep testing new builds.

Adjusting curve doesnt work most of the time , its just hard to click on that, im not sure if io like the way, the best way is always shortcuts, please shortcut every thing there is , adjusting curve should have shortcut too when we select the bone or something and then its child.

I like auto weights, not really weights but segmenting, its a bit limited especially when i want to have a hand with multiple fingers , they dont have own segments for small fingers and small bones but it will speed up work for sure.

I still would like to have control over topology and subdivide when needed witout actually having more verts to pull, kinda like 1st spriter. so  with less verts i would have Z and with more it would be more like S when animating, sometimes i need sharp corners but most of the time i dont i believe default should be something in the middle, maybe tiny bit more towards sharp corners like an elbow maybe, its not super sharp but not like bendy wire either.

[lucid]

@bwwd I agree about the save.  I'll make it a point to fill in some of those gaps soon.    For the curve adjustment shortcut, would something like this work?:  If you have child or parent/child selected, you press a key to make the slider appear below the pointer.  Or maybe hold a key and click and start dragging, and the slider appears under your pointer as you drag. 
 

6 hours ago, bwwd said:

Adjusting curve doesnt work most of the time , its just hard to click on that

Just to be sure, you're trying to right-click the child bone, right?

As far as the auto weights and segmenting, it is a bit limited for now, but the rigging system was built with a lot of room for expansion.




Here's some info that might be helpful, since you mentioned the curviness of the curve.  It's something that will be in a future tutorial, but the basics of how the rigging system works is very different from traditional rigging.   Basically, if you look at the rig above, any vert that lies in the red part is fully rigidly controlled by the parent bone.  Any verts in the blue on the right are completely controlled by the child bone.  All the verts in the violet middle area are controlled by the curve indicated by the center dotted line (the one that you tweak with the 'adjust curve' control).

You can drag any of the lines or points making up the red, violet, and blue rigging zones to adjust what part of the image is mapped to what part of the rig, and when you're in rigging mode, you can drag the end points of the center curve to control how far that mid curve extends.  They don't even have to stay along the bone, and depending on where you place each bone, each end point of the curve, the rigging zones, and the curve level, you can get a variety of behavior. I made a quick video showing a couple of examples of how you can alter the rig to be much curvier.  There's a lot more possibilities though.  

Also, you can have more than two bones selected (in a chain) when you hold b and click to child the mesh to them, to create a longer chain of rigging zones, but the current auto-rigging doesn't always place the rigging zones as well as it does for two, especially for really windy or oddly-proportioned bone chains.  In those cases, you just have to manually tweak it more.