Spine Pro vs COA Tools for Blender (Re-Upload)

This video compares between Blender COA Tools and Spine Pro in terms of 2D animation process. Find out how each of the software options performs!

Keep in mind, COA Tools is an indie solo-dev creation. Which is impressive on it's own! 😉

Enjoy!

Also, some timestamps for your convenience:

00:00 - Introduction
01:19 - Importing Graphics
02:20 - Mesh Creation
04:19 - Bones Creation
05:11 - IK Constraints
06:53 - Mesh Weights
08:31 - Advanced Rigging
09:58 - Animation
11:48 - Path Constraints
12:19 - Character Customization
13:17 - Game Engines Support
15:19 - Price
15:56 - Conclusion

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[AndreasEsau]

Hey,
Andreas here. Creator of COA Tools. Thanks for this great comparison. Really love how well this was made. I never expected COA Tools to even compete with spine. But surely it gave me the inspiration to develop the addon. Right now I am not doing very much on that front. But the export problems are really a bummer. Not testet for a long time. Would love to fix that issue.

I think the creature export could be fixed by setting the export path to an absolute instead of a relative path.

Would you mind sharing this particular project file with me, so I could take a look.

Again, thanks a lot for this video!

[MelvilleG]

Thanks for the video. Just wanted to add that if you want to make those wiggly hair strands in Blender you can use Damped track constraint - it will make those secondary motions fully automatic. Then you can bake it and export to any format, which supports bone-driven animation

[EsotericSoftware]

Very nice comparison video! A few notes (NB: I'm the founder of Spine):
* It would be cool to see more comparisons for the animating process, especially the dopesheet/graph. Rigging is super important of coruse, but generally more time is spent animating so I'd say they are equally important.
* Also it's interesting to know if rigging can change when you already have many animations, eg to add new bones or attachments. That is important not just for fixing mistakes, but so a skeleton can evolve without losing existing work.
* IK with > 2 bones is neat, but in practice it is difficult to control. Also it is non-deterministic: the solution depends on previous frames. If you apply the animation at runtime at a given frame, you won't get the same solution as if you played the animation to reach that frame.
* FWIW, Spine's auto weighting is not using simple distance from vertices to bones, it uses the mesh topography to set weights intelligently. To see this, try rigging a gingerbread man or similar. Even where the arm is near the torso, torso vertices won't get weighted to the arm bones. This (and how well the gingerbread man behaves afterward) might be a good test for auto weight comparison.
* Little tip: in Spine 4.0, once offset is active you can drag any key without needing to make a selection to save a little time.
* It's a bummer to not see how Blender exports behaved, as that is a really big part of choosing the software. FWIW, Spine will have Godot support in time!
Overall I really liked the video and I think your way of comparison by doing the same in both applications is the best way to do it. Cheers!

[TheSteveTheDragon]

3:20 Blender has a merge vertices by distance function you can easily access by selecting all your meshes vertices and pressing alt-m and you can tweak the distance in the popup box FYI.

[adampanowicz]

I thnik it's cool that you took your time and remade this video to correct some issues from the previous one :) Great work!

[arumastudios]

Thanks for the fantastic video! I wanted to share a Blender tip for IK. If your rest pose has the knees bent just a tiny bit, the issue goes away without having to add an extra bone. You don't need the image to actually have bent knees, just the bones need to have a slight angle.

[StarstuffAndUnicorns]

thank you for making this, it's very helpful!!! also your voice is soooo soothing

[GoldenSkullArt]

Great comparison video! Exactly what I needed. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this!

[muhammadshahzaibanwar]

what is told at 11:25 about blender is wrong, if you go to graph editor you can use cycles modifier to get repeated animation. About bone naming thing if you know about armature symmetry you will know the advantage of bone naming in blender,
Blender is way better than people think.

[yanpaingart]

For the bone name, you can press f2 to rename the bone in blender.

[maddyaurora]

its prety sad that Spine does not have a similar counterpart software
if you use 3D software like Maya or Cinema4D, you always have other alternatives
if you use photoshop, there are always alternative that fits you
but with Spine, there is no software close enough to make you change to it

[oneizzyjones]

Would the Time Offset Modifier work in Grease Pencil to change between poses, mouths, eyes or body positions for a character turn?

[no-trick-pony]

I would love to see you trying Live2D vs Spine, since it's a very different system and I can't imagine myself using Spine for head turns or close ups quite like Live2D. Sadly, Live2D does not support Godot and I would have to write my own Godot plugin around their C++ SDK (which would eat up A LOT of my time).

[jink]

Omg I am Literally CRAVING to use this COA tool in ANY blender version for windows 64...
tried 2.79, 2.8, 2.92, 2.93.3 and more with master, branch28, 2.0.0 ver but it won't be shown on the addon tab(even when it says it's installed) or successfully installed, but will show an error log when clicking on re/import sprites
😂😂😂

[razorshark]

Physics-based approach will beat Spine's manual approach, both Creature 2d and Blender, for any hair/cloth-based animation. And also make it look more professional, i guess because in Spine you can quickly go over the features, while in Blender stuff has a more steep learning curve, but more feature-rich. Also, cant you simply export directly to FBX from Blender to import it into Unity and Unreal Engine as you would with 3d models ?

[saitohajime]

hi, how to create head rotation in blender?

[fandrawerNgundam]

as a blender user, this is lovely!
but i would love to see creature 2D vs Spine 2D

[oscardavidayalaguzman]

This is a great video! Very informative. I really enjoy your work! I was wondering if you can make a Live 2d review?

[kken]

thank you for this great video! I bought your course at Udemy on the spine pro.. and now saving money to actually buy the spine pro...Now I wish you have made that a Blender 2D course instead...(cry)

[KalponicGames]

do a comparison of spriter pro vs spine