Show HN: 2D Spine Animation AI for Game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 2D Spine Animation AI for Game

godmodeai.co

29 pointslyogavin12 comments

I built this 2D Spine Animation AI for Game.

Upload a game character image, it directly generate 2D spine animation for your character that can directly apply 2k+ animations.

What it does:

- Auto rigging, auto bone structure generation

- Apply 2k+ animations in a click

- Layered image output

- export directly to spine animation to edit

- export to all game engines like Unity and Godots

- 10x easier, 10x cheaper for game development

Open articleView on HN

The actual user-generated stuff looks way worse than the cherry-picked examples on the landing page. E.g. https://www.godmodeai.co/animation-generation/15925

That's still pretty remarkable if you're not a pixel artist. I was expecting way worse. And my guess is you can keep trying. You're not limited to one generation.

I know the retort is often to "hire a pixel artist", but many people genuinely just want to make something themselves.

> if you're not a pixel artist

Are you looking at the input or the animation? The input is decent pixel art. The output is decent pixel art... on the first frame. One it's in motion it immediately becomes a blurry, non-pixel-art mess that would all need to be redone. It can't just be drawn over with a pixel art tool, the proportions are all off from the original and things don't move they way they should for a sprite animation.

I'm not an artist but I am decent with the pen tool, and for graphic design stuff I typically use AI art to give me a thing I can trace in illustrator with the pen tool, and fix any errors or imperfections I deem worthy of fixing.

I would imagine this kind of tool would allow someone who is not gifted at art (e.g. how do I translate a 2d sprite I made into a forward facing running animation?) the same kind of thing: a pathway to potentially "trace" the generated image, making it better than the original and removing any undesired aspects.

Yeah, I'll admit that it is a bit better than I expected but forcing a player to watch this on a loop would be rough.

Sprite assets are going to be potentially seen MILLIONS of times by the same player over the course of the game. So... unlike a lot of cute one-off GenAI videos they have to stand up to significantly more scrutiny.

Any possibility of getting all of those things except the animations themselves? Mostly curious about the auto rigging, auto bone structure and layered image output so I could do the animation myself with Spine yet use the tool so I can skip the annoying rigging/setup steps :) But currently it kind of forces me to generate the rigging + animation together.

Also, being able to touch up the model between Step 1 and Step 2 would probably be a neat addition, I could see some minor faults I could quickly clean up if I could download the generated .glb and import a new version, so Step 2 doesn't rely on a model containing mistakes.

Otherwise, this looks pretty damn good, the UX is slightly confusion at first, and the colors all over the place on the website itself, but it does seem to work better than I expected. Kudos for making the life of animators easier :)

Edit: two minor notes, the download URLs doesn't actually trigger a browser download, but instead shows it in the browser, and the uploaded files seems to end up being semi-public, no authentication at all. Might want to tell people to not upload private content just yet, or put uploaded/generated data behind auth. Might want to zip up all the files (so the directories for the image is correct too) and offer a download of that instead.

Edit2: Looking at the generated .atlas, are all the names correct? I'm seeing "animated_Orc Idle_7328aa0f" even in the .atlas files generated from my own characters, using a walking animation. The attachments in the skins also reference "animated_Orc" in the generated .json, maybe it's just some static string that isn't supposed to change?

I'm attempting something similar.

No spine support, but very good, consistent, high quality animations. BYOS (bring your own sprite) is supported.

https://gametorch.app/sprite-animator

The integration of AI with Spine animation is technically impressive, particularly the auto-rigging feature which addresses a traditionally challenging task. However, I'm curious about the accuracy of the bone structure generation for non-standard characters and how often manual adjustments are necessary. Additionally, the quality of retargeting animations to varying character proportions and the diversity of the animations I can imagine must be challenging

In my little test (using my own meager talents to create the source character), it is impressive what it's able to do. But the end result is unusable.

How is the working under the hood? Is it creating a true 3D animation of the character, then converting that to a Spine animation?

Are you making an API?

I wouldn’t be using it for game dev - I want spritesheets of custom characters for a 2D animation maker agent.

As an indie dev, this is a really neat concept. Good luck building the startup!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com