happy valentine's day, it's time for a MOM ROADTRIP!
I didn't end up doing as much as I wanted to with it, because alas. time makes fools of us all. fortunately they remain fabulous even if they're just piling into Dylla's van to go down the road and get Starbucks and, let's be real, talk about how much they love dressing up their kids in silly little froofy outfits. the froofier the better. life goals right there.
(disclaimer that the open/close transition was traced off of a screencap, everything else is by me, j-just ignore how incredibly lazy I got in terms of actually drawing anything new. whoops.)
"hmm, Dylla's gonna be really easy to rig after the others, what if I just...massively overcomplicated things for myself for no reason...?"
nah but for real, it didn't feel right to not give her Deuce's real dad her big ol' van. the chibi mom roadtrip is gonna have to wait a bit, but I figured she deserved a post to herself anyway!
reminder: these are NOT edits and are not for free use; I drew and rigged her from scratch! please do not use these for your own edits or in your videos, thanks!!
waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night: I FORGOT A MOM
I'm not super happy with how she came out -- in particular I think I broke style a little too much -- but at this point I need to call her done and maybe get back to her another day! in the meantime, the collection of moms is complete (for now) and there can maybe even be...a roadtrip round two??? 🚐
reminder: these are NOT edits and are not for free use; I drew and rigged her from scratch! please do not use these for your own edits or in your videos, thanks!!
since Eng is getting 7.5 soon(?), I felt motivated to go back to my Meleanor rig and make her a couple of lesson animations! ...except for alchemy, because the cauldron bubbles proved too hard to photoshop around, whoops.
maybe she just got lost on her way to the classroom...?
(credit: backgrounds are from the game, I just put her on top of 'em)
(aside from the backgrounds, this is not an edit, I drew her from scratch! please do not tag or treat as an edit!)
Dylla's timelapse! upfront warning for some minor flickering and/or flashing from sped-up zooming/layer changes (there's also a couple of seconds of accidental black screen, marked in the timestamps, because I misaligned a couple of clips while stitching and I didn't want to spend forever re-rendering the video :x). as per ush, this is intended to skip around in just to see whatever catches your interest; there are rough timestamps in both the video chapters and the description! I also actually recorded the rigging process this time (starts at 1:54:47); Dylla was kind of boringly straightforward to rig, but in case you wanted to see the process! 🤷
and this isn't in the video, but I accidentally turned her van off at one point, and immediately had to drop everything to export:
AND! if for some reason you wanted to see more rigging! I did find the missing chunk of Georgina's recordings, so I put that up too! it's 99% just a million years of mesh weighting! (with a disclaimer that these are intended for animated illustrations and not actual game use so. please do not judge my meshes too harshly. 🙇)
aaand here's Georgie's timelapse!! upfront warning for some minor flickering and/or flashing from sped-up zooming/layer changes (it's less sped-up though so not nearly as bad as the Meleanor video).
it includes drawing both her the backgrounds, so please enjoy two straight hours of me putting a ton of work into things I ended up not even showing, as per the norm. there are rough timestamps in the video description; if you really want to just sit and watch it straight through then more power to ya, but it's mostly intended to skip around in to see what you want!
(hope you like me being Very Bad at drawing her hat)
ego do you have any tips for how you animate on spine?
I'm not great at animating (I'm more into making things than actually using them) (hides eight million unused hand poses behind my back) so I don't think I can be much help with, like, animation principles or anything like that. but just in terms of Spine workflow specifically, there are some things I've found that paying attention to makes the process a bit easier! their user guide covers most of it (and their hotkey cheat sheet saves my life regularly), but if it helps here's the major stuff I keep in mind when I'm working on my little guys!
personally, I like to animate with:
-> Auto Key on (automatically adds a keyframe whenever anything is changed; when off, you have to manually click the key icon to set a keyframe)
-> bone visibility off (bones still appear if you hover over them or have them selected)
I find that 99% of animating uses translate (hotkey V) and rotate (hotkey C); the 'pose' mode (to the left of the transform panel, above 'weights') lets you rotate/translate just by dragging instead of switching tools if that's more intuitive for you, although I usually just use the hotkeys. (THOUGH as of January 2026 there's currently a bug in the 4.3 beta that causes the pose tool to be weirdly jerky, so you might want to either avoid pose mode or use the non-beta version until that's fixed.)
one thing I really like about the Spine UI is that for most things, you can just hover over something for a second and it'll pop up a tooltip with a short description and the associated hotkey for whatever it is!
it makes it REALLY easy to keep track of all the buttons and brush up on hotkeys for stuff you use often! 👍
-> visibility and being able to see the dang character
the visibility/selection panel is SUPER helpful -- the cursor icon (first column) will toggle things on/off of being able to click to select them (if you find you're having trouble selecting bones because your image attachments are getting in the way, turning image selection off will save your life). the eye icon (second column) is visibility, and the tag (third column) is names. ('others' includes paths, clipping mask boundaries, points, etc.)
with everything visible, it gets real confusing real fast:
(I believe names are off by default, this is just to show everything on.) but especially if you have a more bone-dense area, it REALLY helps to turn off their visibility so they're not visually getting in the way!
you can also toggle individual bones in the tree, which is extra helpful if you've got a bunch of bones controlled by constraints that you aren't going to be directly manipulating:
you can also filter the tree view by bones/slots/attachments, which makes searching for and selecting things a lot easier:
and as you can see from all my other screenshots, you can also set colors for your bones in setup mode! VERY useful for keeping track of parts that overlap a lot during animation, like legs or dangly accessories. and color includes alpha, so you can also control their transparency!
caveat: DON'T use cyan/light blue, because that's the color Spine uses to show something is selected. it'll make it really difficult to tell if it's selected or not if it's the same color!
-> keys and reading frames
if something has a key icon next to it, it can be keyed (usually by clicking the key icon itself):
the color tells you whether you've set a key for it or not:
-> GREEN: does not have a keyframe (but can have one)
-> ORANGE: has been changed, but a key hasn't been set (if Auto Key is off)
-> RED: has a keyframe set
(it took me. a bit. to get used to red = set and green = not set. but it does get pretty ingrained after a while!)
when you're animating, you can immediately tell what kind of interpolation is happening between keys by looking at the lines between them on the dopesheet:
for most things, Spine defaults to linear, unless you've keyframed something without first setting a key in the first frame:
in this case it assumes the setup position as the first frame and sets it to stepped. (confession, I forget to set keyframes at 0 all the time, so I am. very grateful that they make it obvious. :')
you can see all of these and fine-tune the easing in the graph of course, but, idk, I just really like being able to see it and quickly set things via the dopesheet too! though bear in mind that things like changing attachments and draw order can't be interpolated, so they don't show lines between them:
you can also filter the keys that are visible on the dopesheet by transform/key type! (cmd/ctrl click to select multiple)
this is SUPER SUPER useful when you wanna do things like move a bunch of specific keys on multiple bones, or use things like the shift or offset tools (which looooove also moving around draw order keys if they're visible) (I love them too much to stop using them but they do me dirty sometimes 😔). also good for hunting down stray keys in case of Auto Key accidents (rare but, y'know, it happens).
it's probably pretty obvious by now that I stay very basic (like I said, I'm more into just making little guys than actually doing anything with 'em :') but. idk! Spine is one of those things where you can do so MUCH, especially as they add more features, that sometimes it's easy to miss the littler helpful things like "hey you can filter your keys" or "you can turn bones off so you don't have to be hacking through eight billion tiny little controls for Meleanor's cape like a machete through tree branches while hunting for the lost holy grail of her arms". I do find their guide and cheatsheet to be pretty comprehensive, and their sample projects in particular are a great way to get a feel for how things look in practice! 👍👍
SHE'S DONE! after a thousand years, she's finally done! ...or at least I'm done with her! (tumblr please don't absolutely destroy my gifs, I am begging you)
(this is not an edit, I drew her from scratch! please do not tag or treat as an edit!)
now you know the real reason I haven't been obsessively drawing Meleanor, which is that I was in fact obsessively drawing Meleanor but in secret. plus a little background just for fun!
I am. not super happy with her rig; parts of her proved way more difficult than I expected and I very quickly hit the point of "okay, this is a silly fan project and not something that I'm being paid for or has to be really functional, time to MANUALLY KEY ALL THE VERTICES FOREVER". I think the end result came out pretty okay though! just...don't look too close. :')
I recorded some of the drawing part, so I might put that up later! in the meantime I am going to make her do stupid poses for my own enjoyment!
