SkeletonViewer: Preview support for Compound Skin

CandiJon

Hi, I'm a developer working on a project that heavily uses spine skins to separate parts of entities in our game, mainly for performance reasons.

At runtime, we create a compound skin using the Skin.AddSkin API, and play animations from there.

This works great at runtime, and the animators have support for it in Spine itself.

However, as a developer I do not use the Spine app and so when I want to preview/debug animations I have two options:

SkeletonViewer.jar
Unity component preview or EditorSkeletonPlayer

All of these options work great for previewing simple animations, and support selecting a single skin, but do not support multiple skins.
Thus if I want to test an animation that requires bones from more than one skin, the preview will be broken, and I have to set it up properly in play mode, which costs iteration time.

Is is possible to add this feature (selecting multiple skins in SkeletonViewer.jar)?
It would be super convenient!
Thanks

Misaki

CandiJon Thank you very much for your feedback.

Spinebot is correct that the Spine Trial can be used for previews. However, I believe that enabling the combination of multiple skins within SkeletonViewer is an idea that we should consider. I opened an issue for improvement here:
EsotericSoftware/spine-editor957

You can subscribe to this issue ticket to receive notifications when there is any progress on this issue.

Spinebot

Unfortunately, the Skeleton Viewer doesn't currently support viewing multiple skins at once. It's designed as a lightweight tool for basic previewing, and as you've noted, it only allows selecting a single skin at a time.

However, there are a couple of alternatives you might find helpful:

Spine Trial Version
The Spine trial version can open projects and JSON files, and it includes the full Skins view functionality. In the Skins view, you can "pin" multiple skins and preview them together, which is exactly what you need for testing animations that require bones from multiple skins.

Skins view example

Extending the Skeleton Viewer
Since you're a developer, another option is to extend the Skeleton Viewer yourself. Writing custom tools specific to your workflow is relatively easy with the Spine runtimes, and you could add the multi-skin functionality you need. This would give you exactly the preview experience you're looking for without needing to enter play mode.

For your specific use case where you're creating compound skins at runtime, having a custom preview tool that mimics your runtime skin composition logic could be very valuable for iteration speed.

CandiJon

Misaki Hey Misaki, thanks for responding!

About what SpineBot said- I'll just note that Spine Trial can be used to preview spine projects, but not exported skeleton assets (.json / .skel.bytes) which is what I work with, and is best to test/debug as it's what goes into the game.

I will subscribe to the GitHub issue. Thanks for considering this as a feature, it would be very useful!