Render same skeleton multiply times (in-game and in UI)

Maltakreuz

I am making character stats window in rpg game. There is already a player inside scene as unity game-object with SkeletonRenderer attached to it. Now i want to render the player one more time in unity-ui. How can I achieve this? Maybe it is possible to render spine skeleton in texture as a target? (Probably it is not that easy, because spine-runtime uses different components for in-game spine objects (SkeletonRenderer in-game and SkeletonGraphics for UI)).

Loading Image

The reason why I just do not use same skeleton twice is not performance. Player has pretty much armor and weapons as attachments, so it is not enough just use same SkeletonData again with different renderer.

Another option would be somehow synchronize two skeleton renderers of the same SkeletonData always to render same attachments on/off. Is any easy way to copy attachment state from one renderer to another?

(Or may be there is some other solutions for that task? Basically i just want to "draw" same skeleton one more time in UI)

P.S. I found a SkeletonGhost.cs file from examples in this topic: Render skeleton multiple times in another location? but I do not really know how (and if) it is possible to modify this component to render same SkeletonData "twice".

Harald

There is a RenderExistingMesh example component provided to render an existing MeshRenderer based skeleton component (SkeletonAnimation and SkeletonMecanim) again. You could create your own adaptation of the script that uses a CanvasRenderer as a target.

One drawback here is however that all animations are also mirrored, which is not what you may want.

Maltakreuz ：
Another option would be somehow synchronize two skeleton renderers of the same SkeletonData always to render same attachments on/off. Is any easy way to copy attachment state from one renderer to another?

Copying the attachment state over should be the easiest solution here. Your game state classes should be designed in a way that they know which Attachments and Skins are active at the in-game skeleton. Then all you need to do is apply the same attachments to your UI skeleton.

While you could query the in-game SkeletonAnimation skeleton's Skin for active attachments, this is not the clean and recommended way.

Maltakreuz

Thank you, the solution with RenderExistingMesh.cs works acceptable for me. It has some little drawbacks:

I am not sure why, but i need manually add all my 10 skeleton materials as replacment materials to RenderExistingMesh-component, just where each material "replaces itself". And if i update my atlasses/materials, then i need do not forget to update this replacment lists too.It looks like this (right magenta), if i just leave replacment list empty:
Unfortunately referenceMaterial can not be just reassigned at runtime. Since there are four characters in the game party, I had to make one copy for each and hide all the rest. If i just reassign reference at runtime, i get this:
Loading Image (Reset in Inspector does not help, Adding sorting-group-component does not work too). Together with point above i need update all 4 replacment lists. Not a big deal, but there is a risk just to forget to do it manually after some player adjustments.
One more thing, since i use this player big preview on game pause, i need to update skeletonAnimation manually with unscaled time. SkeletonAnimation has no "unscaled time" in Advanced options, like SkeletonGraphics. Found the solution here: http://en.esotericsoftware.com/forum/Time-timeScale-and-still-play-animation-on-specific-object-9054
And one little problem more: Since SkeleotnAnimation is used in UI, it works. But it was not that easy to render object inbetween of UI elements. Only behind or on top. On top would be OK in most cases, but i need to draw context help on top of everything. Solved it just by using

You could create your own adaptation of the script that uses a CanvasRenderer as a target.

I did not change RenderExistingMesh.cs at all and it seems to work anyway. Why should i modify it?

One drawback here is however that all animations are also mirrored, which is not what you may want.

Mirrored? Do you mean there is no flip? In my case it is exactly what i want. Even if player looks left, i want the inventory-preview to be alwasy unflipped.

Or do you mean played in reverse as "mirrored"? If so... no just tested it on walk animation, it will be played exactly as referenceMaterial in forward order.

Copying the attachment state over should be the easiest solution here. Your game state classes should be designed...

Well, probably you are right. I need implement such functionality for Inventory anyway. I just not sure what to do first: GUI or RpgSys with invetnroy, stats etc. So i decided to start with GUI and attachment-mangment is just not ready for now. But SkeletonGraphics with synchronized attachments should do the same task more easily and probably does not need 4 workarounds listed above. But for now RenderExistingMesh seems to work fine.

P.S.

While you could query the in-game SkeletonAnimation skeleton's Skin for active attachments, this is not the clean and recommended way.

I have tryed it with this code:

string str = "";
foreach (var skin_entry in SkeletonAnim.Skeleton.Skin.GetAttachments()) {
    str += skin_entry.Name + " -> " + skin_entry.Attachment.Name + "\n";
}
Debug.Log(str);

But it only lists skin-attachments. In my rig all skins have common armor/weapons as attachments that belong to no skin. So they are not listed here.

Harald

Maltakreuz ：
I did not change RenderExistingMesh.cs at all and it seems to work anyway. Why should i modify it?

That is strange, as RenderExistingMesh.cs is copying the mesh to a target MeshRenderer, while SkeletonGraphic is using CanvasRenderer. Anyway, happy that it works.

Maltakreuz ：
Mirrored? Do you mean there is no flip? In my case it is exactly what i want. Even if player looks left, i want the inventory-preview to be alwasy unflipped.

Sorry, mirror was misleading. What I meant is that the UI element will share the same animation pose. So when the character is attacking in-game, the UI counterpart will also play the attack animation. This is not always desired.

Maltakreuz ：
But it only lists skin-attachments. In my rig all skins have common armor/weapons as attachments that belong to no skin. So they are not listed here.

Sorry, I was just previously working on a Skin API example scene and must have thought in the wrong direction.
You should be able to access all slots of a skeleton like this: skeletonAnimation.Skeleton.Slots, then you can access slot.Attachment at each element.

Maltakreuz

Harald ：
Anyway, happy that it works.

Yes, i have created an empty game object with new MeshRenderer and new MeshFilter and this script works without modifications just by referencing original SkeletonAnim and replacing all it's materials with "itselfs". Anyway i do not really know how to modify this script, so i am happy it works just out of the box. 🙂

Harald ：
So when the character is attacking in-game, the UI counterpart will also play the attack animation. This is not always desired.

Ah, yes this really happens. Has undesired sideeffects: while game is paused, the selected character still plays IDLE animations. But since game blurs screen if pause menu is active this does not breaks too much. Second problem if player opens pause menu during attack/jump etc puppet-char in stats window has the same pose. Well not very nice but acceptable. I could push/pop animation during pause menu to avoid this.

Harald ：
all slots of a skeleton like this: skeletonAnimation.Skeleton.Slots

I am still thinking THIS is the right and clean path to accomlish this task, as you correctly have mentioned it before. For now i just leave this patch-solution with RenderExistingMesh but i probably should invest in this story a couple of days and make it once again clean with separate SkeletonGraphics. It will auto-solve all stange behaviors above.

Thank you very much!

Harald

Maltakreuz ：
Yes, i have created an empty game object with new MeshRenderer and new MeshFilter and this script works without modifications just by referencing original SkeletonAnim and replacing all it's materials with "itselfs". Anyway i do not really know how to modify this script, so i am happy it works just out of the box.

Thanks for the clarification, I assumed that you want to use a UI renderer. It will of course work when used with a MeshRenderer, as it's built for it. 🙂

Maltakreuz ：
Harald ：
all slots of a skeleton like this: skeletonAnimation.Skeleton.Slots

I am still thinking THIS is the right and clean path to accomlish this task, as you correctly have mentioned it before.

While it would work as a solution, it is not considerd clean architectural design. The game-state component shall know it's state and tell all visualisation components (Spine skeleton components, 3D models, etc) how to visualize it. Querying one skeleton's skeleton.slots and applying it to the next one is moving the responsibility to the wrong component. And as soon as you would e.g. change the first visualization component to something different, you have suddenly arrived at a dead end.