Spine atlas vs Unity atlas

pixilestudios

Hey we are using Spine for our characters which is working great, but we are also thinking of using it for environment to do animated grass (both for wind and characters walking through it). However, all of our grass/bushes are in one Unity sprite atlas:

(Unity sprites can reference this atlas easily)

This is really important for performance, so I am wondering if it's possible to have Spine reference a sprite from the Unity one, or if we'd have to put every image here into Spine... but then that would mean all of our environment would need to use spine objects with skins or attachments I guess (and is that a performance hit vs regular unity sprites)? We only need a few of the pieces in this atlas to animate which is why I am not sure on the best way to proceed.

Thanks.

Pharan

It wouldn't make a difference since Sprites are rendered using SpriteRenderer and Spine Skeletons are rendered using MeshRenderer.
Even if they share the same backing texture and Material, these two different renderer types would still not be dynamically batched by the engine.

So performance-wise, at least outside of load time, it really makes no difference.

Additionally, there is currently both a way to load your skeleton without a Spine atlas, and to load Sprite textures into your attachments.
So if you really want to put all your sprites in one texture in Unity and have your Spine skeleton be backed by it, you can do that with a bit of extra code.

pixilestudios

I see, combining Sprite/Mesh renderers won't batch, so we have two options perhaps:

Keep the non-animated plants in the existing Unity atlas with Sprite renderers, and move just the animated ones to being in a Spine/mesh renderer. However this means draw-calls would increase, right? Especially if there was a lot of overlap on screen between elements from the old atlas and the new Spine elements.
Move every single plant into a Spine project so they'd all be batched in one Spine atlas. But this means all of the non-animated plants would be using a Mesh renderer (not sure if better or worse).
I guess I need to try this out and see how they perform.