Hey, Andreas here. Creator of COA Tools. Thanks for this great comparison. Really love how well this was made. I never expected COA Tools to even compete with spine. But surely it gave me the inspiration to develop the addon. Right now I am not doing very much on that front. But the export problems are really a bummer. Not testet for a long time. Would love to fix that issue. I think the creature export could be fixed by setting the export path to an absolute instead of a relative path. Would you mind sharing this particular project file with me, so I could take a look. Again, thanks a lot for this video!
I also bought b.painter years ago and am using it till today love it and just put the pencils on a seperate pie.menue by the help of pie.editor.addon :) I try to send you a pm
Hi Andreas Esau, any update of Coa tools for blender 3.1....... actully not working in blender 3.1.......... and thank you in advance for amazing tutorials and coa tools
hey Andreas, thank you for this amazing tool! I´ve just found out about it and unfortunately it´s not working on the current versions of blender...would love to see it working again if possible, i dont think there´s anything like coa tools at the moment!
Very nice comparison video! A few notes (NB: I'm the founder of Spine): * It would be cool to see more comparisons for the animating process, especially the dopesheet/graph. Rigging is super important of coruse, but generally more time is spent animating so I'd say they are equally important. * Also it's interesting to know if rigging can change when you already have many animations, eg to add new bones or attachments. That is important not just for fixing mistakes, but so a skeleton can evolve without losing existing work. * IK with > 2 bones is neat, but in practice it is difficult to control. Also it is non-deterministic: the solution depends on previous frames. If you apply the animation at runtime at a given frame, you won't get the same solution as if you played the animation to reach that frame. * FWIW, Spine's auto weighting is not using simple distance from vertices to bones, it uses the mesh topography to set weights intelligently. To see this, try rigging a gingerbread man or similar. Even where the arm is near the torso, torso vertices won't get weighted to the arm bones. This (and how well the gingerbread man behaves afterward) might be a good test for auto weight comparison. * Little tip: in Spine 4.0, once offset is active you can drag any key without needing to make a selection to save a little time. * It's a bummer to not see how Blender exports behaved, as that is a really big part of choosing the software. FWIW, Spine will have Godot support in time! Overall I really liked the video and I think your way of comparison by doing the same in both applications is the best way to do it. Cheers!
Hi Nate, Thanks for checking another comparison video! I truly appreciate that. Let me address the points you've raised: -> In my videos I try to focus on the differences between each software. I see what you mean by covering the animation process in more detail, and I've given a try to the new graph editor and the Favor Tool while making this comparison. The truth is, Blender has a similar graph editor and the Breakdowner Tool. I didn't feel like there's much difference, that's why it wasn't covered. -> Rig modification can be interesting indeed. Will try to include it for the next comparison. -> I think the use case of the IKs with more than two bones is primarily tentacles. I know that you guys offer a different approach by using the Path constraints, and that totally works, maybe even better than the IKs. -> Gingerbread test. Hmmm, sounds like fun to me! :) -> It's great to know that I don't need to select the keys anymore. I'm going to use that a lot! -> I know Godot support has been requested a lot, and it's great to hear that it's coming! Thanks again for such a detailed feedback! There's more videos to come, so stay tuned. ;)
Any idea on when Godot support is coming? Missing Godot support was the reason I did not choose Spine + Godot for me. Instead I went with Cubism Live2D + Unity, since Live2D fits my purposes a little bit better but also has no Godot support. However, I really dislike the Cubism pricing scheme - using their SDK costs a fortune (roughly 4000 for two platforms a year) once you hit 75k on sales (not profit) a year, which is a very low boundary and especially annoying for people just barely hitting that boundary.
@@no-trick-pony Wrapping up Spine 4.0 has taken ages. We're very close now, then we hope to fit Godot into 4.1. The idea for 4.1 is to focus on "quality of life" improvements for the editor. Since there won't be lots of runtime changes for 4.1, we can focus on Godot.
Thanks for the fantastic video! I wanted to share a Blender tip for IK. If your rest pose has the knees bent just a tiny bit, the issue goes away without having to add an extra bone. You don't need the image to actually have bent knees, just the bones need to have a slight angle.
3:20 Blender has a merge vertices by distance function you can easily access by selecting all your meshes vertices and pressing alt-m and you can tweak the distance in the popup box FYI.
i do think learning blender will be more beneficial for the future as most problems are learning the keybinds. you'd be able to use your blender knowledge to making 3d animations too. its a very worth it investment and its free
I would love to see you trying Live2D vs Spine, since it's a very different system and I can't imagine myself using Spine for head turns or close ups quite like Live2D. Sadly, Live2D does not support Godot and I would have to write my own Godot plugin around their C++ SDK (which would eat up A LOT of my time).
Well, Live2D can't export to Unity for game dev stuff it's basically JUST for VTuber face tracking AR type stuff. The other softwares can't really do what Live2D does or would have to have a huge workaround making something from scratch in unity or unreal to do what Live2D does but TLDR: Live2D is live2D spine is spine, similar but different purposes
Omg I am Literally CRAVING to use this COA tool in ANY blender version for windows 64... tried 2.79, 2.8, 2.92, 2.93.3 and more with master, branch28, 2.0.0 ver but it won't be shown on the addon tab(even when it says it's installed) or successfully installed, but will show an error log when clicking on re/import sprites 😂😂😂
its prety sad that Spine does not have a similar counterpart software if you use 3D software like Maya or Cinema4D, you always have other alternatives if you use photoshop, there are always alternative that fits you but with Spine, there is no software close enough to make you change to it
thank you for this great video! I bought your course at Udemy on the spine pro.. and now saving money to actually buy the spine pro...Now I wish you have made that a Blender 2D course instead...(cry)
what is told at 11:25 about blender is wrong, if you go to graph editor you can use cycles modifier to get repeated animation. About bone naming thing if you know about armature symmetry you will know the advantage of bone naming in blender, Blender is way better than people think.
Physics-based approach will beat Spine's manual approach, both Creature 2d and Blender, for any hair/cloth-based animation. And also make it look more professional, i guess because in Spine you can quickly go over the features, while in Blender stuff has a more steep learning curve, but more feature-rich. Also, cant you simply export directly to FBX from Blender to import it into Unity and Unreal Engine as you would with 3d models ?
This is something I'd really love to compare, seeing more and more impressible examples done in Rive. Hopefully - the next video will be Rive vs Spine :)
Any chance to see a comparison of spriter pro and spine pro ? I took your course on udemy but cant find any good ones for spriter. By the seeing the demo videos , it seems way more powerful.
Spriter pro is nice but it is not as powerful as spine 2d, however Spriter 2 is much more powerful than Spine 2d, except that Spriter 2 is still under development in alpha and therefore is not stable and not complete, but it promises some beautiful features and powerful ones that I love, like changing the mesh to bend an arm while keeping the aesthetic, which you can't do on Spine 2d
Yes, it definitely can be used with tablet. However, if you experience weird behaviors with it (and if you also use Windows), try disabling the gestures and/or Windows Ink.
thank you for the helpful video. First, I wanted to share information about how you can achieve offset keys in the blender. Here is one of the solutions: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9zhYyM8BC8k.html Secondly, I have a question. Where can I find a photoshop script "BlenderExport"?
Thanks for sharing this info! The Commotion add-on seems to be exactly what is needed, but it works only on Blender 2.9 or newer. COA Tools doesn't support Blender 2.9 yet (not the official package), so it's risky to try to use it this way at the moment. I saw many people reporting errors. Once COA Tools supports newer Blender versions, this combination of add-ons should solve the problem indeed! As for BlenderExport script, here you go: github.com/ndee85/coa_tools/tree/blender28/Photoshop
