I’m currently using this build of COA tools for creating real time 2D characters for Unity 2018.
Kreezii updated the latest version of COA from 2.8 compatibility to 2.9. So I can use Blender 2.93.14 stable with this addon and it will work just fine.
It’s working fine but there are some limitations to COA tools that I’d like to fix in this order of how essential the fix is:
-No Additive or Multiply blend modes for layers: flame particles, neon effects etc require additive blending. Shadows, paint effects etc require multiply blending. This one is essential to be able to keep up with what people are doing in Spine. It would require a template for additive and multiply shader setups which should be no problem in theory. I think the tough part would be converting this to the right shaders that dragonbones (or Creature) can interpret.
Nice to have:
-Compatibility with the latest version of Blender. I’m not even sure where to begin with this. The latest version of blender throws an error the moment you load this addon.
-Layer clipping, the ability to make one object mask several others, even if it’s just the cut-out geometry like in Spine: For shadows, light sheen effects, charge effects etc.
Nice to have in the future:
-Some more control over atlasing, whether it’s using a custom UV channel, or a better UV packing algorithm.
-Custom COA RunTime: Since DragonBones is no longer being maintained, we will probably need something that works on future engines. It’d be nice to support the major engines, but most people are going to want Unity/Unreal/Godot compatibility. This one could be the most challenging, for C#, C++ and GD script would be needed.
If we can get this working, I’ll upload the resulting project as a fork.
If you do that would be amazing. Very few apps have a Script to Import Bone rigged animations directly into Unity or Unreal. Would make blender the go to instead of Spine.
To be truthful I haven’t yet fully dived into this. But I’m realizing that Chat GPT might be the key to helping me figure out how to get things working. So I may hopefully get around to fixing some things.
Since posting this I HAVE been working on my programming skills. Doing FPS game mechanic stuff in Godot using GD script for a personal project. It’s given me a bit of an appetite to learn python some more. I can’t promise anything, but the good news is that I’m now not so clueless with code!
Check out their stuff more, they have loads of awesome software.
All their stuff is free and opensource, and they seem to develop regularly. They have future plans for even better interoperability. So I’m sort of wondering if that is going to be a better future solution to stick with.
That being said; I’m inclined to see what I can do for COA when I’m motivated with my free time.
Also I reckon these RX people deserve funding either way for what they’re doing.
Spine is expensive but the fact that you can author your asset once and use it anywhere, this alone is worth the asking price. You do get a perceptual license as well. Animation wise though I don’t see it being better than blender. The meshing experience is quite excellent though.
The company behind dragonbone seems to went under in 2020. All the website content that linked to their server is no longer available, including the api reference to the dragonbone runtime, so reusing the runtime would be difficult. All institutional knowledge of the runtime engine is already lost.
Ideally every feature of this runtime should be viewable within blender. I don’t know if blender supports clipping a texture with another in world space. Usually masking are done with textures (alpha texture) or vertex group (which requires meshing) You could do boolean objects but those don’t support alpha values. Same goes for blend mode layers.
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know that I updated coa tools to work with the latest blender version. You can download the latest master from here:
I versioned it now 3.0.0. Which will be the version for Blender 4.x because there have been some major changes in the api which makes it hard to be compatible with blender 3 and 4 at the same time.
If you want to install it, make sure to zip the folder coa_tools and install that zip file via the addon manager in blender. Be sure that you are zipping coa_tools folder.(and not the content of the folder) Otherwise it won’t work.