Atlas Export Settings for Unity Lighting

danthat

New to Spine, so please forgive any ignorance on my part.

Just tried exporting a skeleton and importing it into a blank Unity project. I used the Texture Packer and outputted a .png with defaults, and manually set up a Material with the SkeletonLit shader. I added a .txt to the .atlas and .json files, and set up Spine Atlas and Spine Data objects, and dragged all the bits across.

He displays fine, but like this:

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Is there something special I need to tick when exporting the .png? I've packaged up and imported the Goblin example, and he displays absolutely perfectly. As far as I can tell, all the settings between the two are exactly the same, which leads me to believe it might be a texture export issue?

danthat

Aha, clicking "Premultiplied Alpha" in Texture Export settings seems to have fixed that, but the lighting still isn't right. Any chance of a head's up as to what should be clicked for exporting atlases?

Nate

Clicking the "Defaults" button should give you decent packer settings. What is wrong with lighting?

danthat

It's lighting on a by-bone basis, rather than as one glorious whole:

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(ambient light is at 0,0,0 to show the problem. Eyes are lighting, head isn't)

Nate

Is that a directional light? A directional light works in the spine-tk2d spineboy demo, what is different?

danthat

It's a point light. I'm seeing a similar issue if I export the Goblin from the example and import the package into my fresh Unity project; lighting seems a bit more flaky in my own project than the Goblin example. Bones lighting independently etc.

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Nate

How big is your light? Could be the vertex lighting. Vertex lighting would work better once Spine had meshes, since you could have as many vertices as you like.

danthat

Yes. Looks like it's an issue related to Point Lights.

I've shrunk the characters down to a scale of 0.01 (so they're about 2 metres tall in Unity terms) and the point light has a range of 10 and an intensity of 2. At a distance of about 3-4 units from the Skeleton, it seems to light nicely.

At higher intensities/ greater distances, the light causes a sort of pop-in effect, where bones will suddenly go black. If the light gets too close/ too far away, cracks really start to show...

I've set up a test project if you want to take a look. There are two lights, if you move them left-and-right that should show there's quite a marked difference. I don't know if anything can be done about that, or if all lights always need to be in a goldilocks zone to prevent issues?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jevubguslcif7wp/lighting.zip

Thanks for your help 🙂

Nate

It's a limitation of vertex lighting, if the light is hitting an image but not a vertex, the image doesn't get any light. If your lights are big enough then it works pretty well.

Vertex lighting performs well. Pixel lighting takes more processing but would be the solution. I haven't got per pixel lighting to work though. Another solution is to use a mesh with more vertices instead of an image with only 4, but Spine doesn't yet support attaching meshes to a skeleton.

danthat

Understood, thanks. Will soldier on and hope it doesn't cause problems later in development 🙂

Thanks again. Loving the Spine interface, there's nothing like a nice tactile set of buttons to help my workflow.