Hello,
Please excuse any stupid questions. I'm a Mechanical/Aerospace Engineer building a prototype myself and I have no formal training in this.
I am making a web app where users can create a custom avatar. They'll be able to pick from multiple heads, arms, bodies etc, and be able to set colors, positions, and scales. For example they may want their creature to have larger ears angled down like a floppy ear bunny.
The skeletons will basically have the same number of joints, but some bones could be moved/scaled.
The avatars will need to be animated, and since users can choose from many parts, I need to make sure there is a good workflow. Hopefully we animate this more or less once, and that animation can be applied regardless of which skin. Basic data can be brought in such as arm_scale=1.15.
The initial plan is to have everything in SVG. But that said to do everything I want I may need to get this to work in Canvas or WebGL.
I have no experience in animating, but I'll probably be the one making the first demo before we bring someone in. This being the case I probably need an easy interface with IK etc.
Currently looking at doing the animations with Spine. However it sounds like they don't handle SVGs well, and I don't see a great way to handle changing colors if everything is rasterized. For SVG users could choose any RGB they want and I can update Fill on the fly. Rasterized seems like they'll have fewer color choices, and I'll have to fill the database with many instances of the same leg with multiple colors etc.
How does your rigging system compare with Spine? Does your system have the ability to bring in Spine Exports to do the animations? I'm looking at their JSON https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/blob/3.8/spine-ts/canvas/example/assets/spineboy-ess.json and I'm hoping you guys have a way to parse this and apply those translations to SVGs.
I'm hoping to get this right the first time since at the moment I'm getting ready to set up the database to store what I need. In the long run I see a lot of man hours going in to this, so I'm hoping I make the right choice early on.
Also in the long run, we might want the users to be able to control their avatar in small games, or also program their avatars to do things and the avatar would carry out that program.
Since this is my first post, if this goes through I'll link to my conversation with Spin for reference in a reply. Don't want the post to vanish.
Again, apologies for any stupid questions. This isn't my area of expertise.
Thanks!
Keith