How to delete a region in mesh mode? & Sprite Swapping issue.

[furrfire]

Hi there! Recently chose to get creature over spine, just so much faster and easier to use I felt after a lot of testing with both trials. Loving the app, but there are a few questions I have-

I know how to delete a mesh, but how do I remove a region part? I imported a png part I decided I don't need now.
Maybe I overlooked it, but I can't find any info on this with a search or the documentation.

Next question-

Sprite swapping. I noticed there is a limit to how many sprites can be on the sprite manager page. I increased the atlus size to 8k and it seems to hold a lot more but, might not be enough if I have a LOOOOT of equipment and effects to swap in and out of a character, with each piece being a larger png size. Going in and out of the manager also loads slow like this too. Am I going about this wrong? Could png file item swaps be handled in unreal- without them first being imported into the sprite manager in creature?

[chong]

Hello,

To answer your questions:

1) If I am understanding your question correctly, are you asking about deleting a meshed region in meshing mode? The first way is to simply re-import a new PNG without that part, then re-mesh. After that, you can click on Tools -> Sync Meshing to Rig Regions to sync up the new regions. You can even edit your full character atlas directly.

Here is another way: If you go into your project folder, you should see your png atlas file. Just be careful you don't delete it of course. You can open up the atlas png in any program ( like Photoshop ) and erase out the body part you do not want. After that, reload your project. You can click on the empty mesh region and there is a delete button in meshing mode that allows you to delete that mesh region.

2) Sprite Swapping is one method of doing it, but the other newer method is Skin Swapping:
https://www.kestrelmoon.com/creaturedoc ... pping.html
For this method, you should create a very large character atlas for your character. Then simply put in all the items you want into it for swapping. The advantage of this is you do not have to deal with the Sprite Swap Manager. It might offer you another way to solve your problem.

Cheers

[furrfire]

Aaaaaaand this is another reason I went with creature over spine, I noticed you are fast to reply and extremely helpful. Thank you very much.


One last thing---
Not sure if you know, or if it's even a problem or not, but my coder wanted me to tell you--- the sprite manager- if you remove and re add the same images the negative tag number keeps counting. Even when I deleted all sprites on there, the tag number doesn't start over at 1, instead continues where it left off before I deleted any pics.

[furrfire]

Okay, after trying out skin swapping for a while...


Is there a way to reorganize (without deleting and re-adding) sprites in the sprite manager?

I am pretty sure I want to go with that for my modular armor system, because skin swapping with 100 pieces of modular gear just makes a huge mess of meshes on the mesh list, and animation lists, requires me to mesh each piece, assign each piece to a bone, weight them, and order all of them in depth, unless I am missing something\doing it wrong, this seems to be a painful\slow way to do this?
EDIT**- I actually ended up going with skin swapping, instead of sprite manager- it gave more flexibility in the end and saved more on texture space. It does make for a big mess to manage in the rig screen though, but otherwise wasn't as bad to do as feared. **



I guess what I am asking for- is what is the best way to do an equipment attachment slot system like Spine has? Sprite manager and using mesh placeholders for all my equip slots seems to work really good, extremely fast once setup, and does what I want for the most part if I size and draw my item png's correctly. I just worry about the size limit on the sprite manager atlus- I plan to have a LOOOOOOOT of items. I think I'm on the right track, but if you have a better idea before I get rolling with this I'm all ears.

[chong]

Hello,

So I did some research online and found out most game engines ( UE4, Unity ) cap your max texture size to 8192, that is the reason why the texture atlas limits the max resolution to 8k. I think you will need to fit most of your items in that size in order for the game engine to process it ( and run it at a decent FPS )

As for reorganizing the items in the sprite manager, I will need to investigate since it involves repacking the entire texture again and the IDs will change since the sprites are moved around ( a bit more complicated then imagined ). Having said that, I need to address a couple of bug fixes/workflow improvements that are coming up for the next update which is soon ( includes a much improved convert all to S-Curve feature )

Thank you for your report and suggestions, I will need to look into it first. There might be a better technical solution I can think of that will result but some time will be needed to find out the answer.

Cheers

[furrfire]

AH! That's why there is a size limit. My plan to get around this is to have 2 (or more if needed) versions of the whole char animation- so I can fit in another huge batch of sprites should I end up needing it. I will also trim down my pngs and placeholder mesh sizes. I think I'll be okay going forward, I hope.

Thanks again, and seeing your great track record I look forward to what you come up with in the future.

[chong]

Hello,

Good news, I found a more efficient way to order SpriteSwap items. I will be giving you 2 new buttons: Move Up + Move Down. You single select a sprite swap image and clicking on them will allow you to shift that item up and down your sprite swap list. This video illustrates the new functionality in action:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fynhaf3u3jfqz ... s.mp4?dl=0

Sorry just single item moving for now, will improve the workflow in the future to allow multiple item moving + maybe dragging/dropping. But for now, this new feature should at least streamline and save you time in terms of your workflow. After your moved the items around, please remember to Save Project to save out the new item order.

The new feature will be in for the upcoming Windows update.

Cheers

[furrfire]

Watched the demo video---

Yes that will work very well for reorganizing thank you!

[zampano]

Taht's a great feature! Would it also be possible to reassign the Tag numbers? Either automatically or even by hand. As is, I sometimes have like -5, -7 and -8 in use or something, since deleting an item wont free it's tag number.

[chong]

Hello,

Tag numbers have to be unique, so you will not be able to assign a tag number that already exists. I will be rolling out a whole slew of fixes/updates first before any new features so as to ensure a stable release.

Thanks