Spine Pro vs Dragonbones

dragon bones i've been hearing about this 2d animation software for a while now and i've been really curious to try it out myself especially since i've received quite a few positive feedbacks about dragon bones from you guys and was also told that it was pretty similar to spine pro except you know it's free so i thought i'd put spine pro and dragon bones side by side to see the strength and the weaknesses each animation software has upon the other spoiler alert both of them are better in some aspects and less good in others my goal here is to simply show you the comparison between the two for my experiment i've took one of my existing spine projects in which i used most of spine pro features i tried to replicate the project in dragon bones without losing quality and improving it if possible to make the most accurate comparison i've used exactly the same assets and tried to keep the meshes and the bone structure as close to the original as i could then i went through all stages of the animation process and at each stage compared the capabilities of dragon bones to those of spine so let's see how they performed the first thing we do with the animation software is import our character images into it now in spine before we can start using the character assets we have to export them from photoshop using a special script which converts the photoshop layers into images and creates a json file it is a lengthy and slightly complex procedure that can take a few tries to get it done right with dragon bones however we can just take our psd file drag it into the editor window and it will work just like that very intuitive no scripts involved to tell you the truth i was quite surprised and really liked how much simpler it was to import character images into dragon bones so dragon bones takes this round for sure the next step would usually be creating the meshes i've put all my effort to make the dragonbones meshes look identical to those in spine project and place all of the vertices at exact same positions but this is where i've started to face some unfortunate disadvantages of dragon bones i've noticed that for some reason dragon bones would slightly stretch the image as soon as i turned it into a mesh here see it was pretty weird and i didn't find a way to fix the issue if you have an idea as to what causes this or how to fix that please leave a comment down below also for no apparent reason some of my meshes became distorted as you can see here and it took me a few tries to figure out a way to get proper results with dragon bones there is a learning curve to any new software of course but in this respect spine is much more accessible in addition both programs have auto generate or auto trace feature designed to help you define the mesh boundaries for your shapes i've tested this feature in both dragon bones and spine using the same image and here is the result in dragon bones and that's how it looks like in spine you can see that the difference is pretty significant unfortunately the auto-generated mesh from dragon bones is simply not usable so my conclusion is that when it comes to meshes spine is way more reliable than dragon bones this round goes to spine next we're moving on to creating a rig i found the bones creation process in dragon bones very similar to the processing spine the only difference is that in dragon bones if you create a bone on top of the image the new bone will automatically be named after the image and the image will be assigned to the new bone no need to do it manually after the bone is created or by holding the ctrl key as in spine this is a very useful feature that saves you time and effort therefore dragon bones takes this round after we've completed the core rig we should proceed to the inverse kinematic constraints if you are not familiar with this feature here is what it does in a nutshell it allows you to create an anchor for the bones so when you move the anchor around the constrained bones adjust their position automatically in accordance to the movement constraints this is quite useful when animating the legs for example the process of creating the ik constraints in spine is not very straightforward and it takes a few tries to get used to it in dragon bones however all you need to do is select the bones that you want to constrain and click a single button that's it really super simple and works like a charm this is the most commonly used scenario for the ik constraints and therefore this point goes to dragon bones next we start binding the meshes to the bones these steps allows us to easily deform the character images later during the animation process at first these process in dragon bones seem to me pretty similar to the processing spine you select the mesh choose the bones that you want to bind and click a button to automatically generate the mesh weights okay good the automatic weights work pretty well for the simple meshes however in some cases such as with the hair over there i usually need to make some manual adjustments to make it look right and here is where i stumbled upon another problem in dragon balls to adjust the mesh weights in dragon bones you have to select a bone then manually select the vertices that need to be changed and modify the weights like so you also need to make the calculations of how much weight you want to assign on your own sorry if i'm getting too much into the technical details but what i'm trying to say is that such a process is very time consuming especially if you have several measures that you need to adjust spine on the other hand gives you a nifty option of painting the weights like so this feature allows you to fix a mesh within seconds and the result looks pretty awesome too it is much easier than the work that you have to do in dragonbones so spine takes this round last step before proceeding to the animation stage is to get our character's rig ready for two and a half d animation to achieve this effect we can make certain bones move opposite each other like shown here in spine this feature is called transform constraints it allows you for example to make the front and the back of the head move in opposite directions creating an illusion of a three-dimensional character and it is as easy as it looks also the use of transform constraints really simplifies the animation process because it allows you to move the whole head with just a single bone unfortunately as it turns out dragonbones does not support any advanced triggering techniques except for the ik constraints so spinepro takes this round as well once the rig is finally complete we move on to the animation stage of the project as i've said previously dragon bones doesn't support many of the advanced triggering techniques and therefore creating a 3d illusion was not a simple task basically i had to animate each mesh directly so that it would look like the character turns her head towards the screen not going to lie it took me a while to get to a somewhat ok result i could definitely do better if i were to spend even more time animating the meshes but the process felt too time consuming as it was and then during the animation process i realized i was facing an even bigger problem you see to make the movement of the character looks smooth and realistic you have to follow the 12 principles of animation one of the core principles follow through and overlapping action states that some parts of the character's body should move slightly before or slightly after the other parts spine makes it extremely easy to apply this principle by allowing you to simply offset certain keyframes of a looping animation it takes literally seconds to turn this animation into this animation and you don't even need to be a pro dragon bones however does not offer any solution for this so if you want to have an overlapping action in dragon bones you'll need to move all the keys manually create the corresponding keys properly to close the loop and if you've configured the curves for easing and ease out well the configuration will be ruined and you'll have to make the adjustments for that as well bottom line if this sounds like a lot of work to you that's because it really is i could have spent a few more hours to fix the offsets and the curves but i decided to stop right there the same actions that would take a second to perform in spine take minutes if not hours in dragonbones simply because it lacks a certain functionality in terms of the animation process spine proves to be more efficient and therefore receives another point another key feature that was kind of missing for me in dragon bones was the ability to constrain the bone to follow a certain path what this means is that this kind of animations would be very hard to create in dragon bones not to mention a snake slithering animation or a proper tentacle movement spine allows you to make those considerably easily by using the path constraints feature and therefore it deserves another point now one more thing before we move on if your game relies heavily on the character customization you will need an easy way to switch between different character skins in order to see how another skin will look like in dragon dragonbones you'll have to completely replace the character images you cannot configure a new skin set for the same skeleton in dragonbones editor the only way you can switch between the skins is in the game engine and through the code spine on the other hand offers a better solution you can configure multiple skins for the same character inside the editor itself and easily switch between them you can add certain bones to specific skins and even animate them differently see the hats that i've animated here they're all just different skins moreover in spine you don't need to have a separate set of images for each skin here for instance the original image is white and i'm only changing the colors in spine itself to create different skins this is very efficient so when it comes to character customization spine takes the cup and since we've already mentioned the code i decided to export my project from dragonbones and import into unity the process looks pretty much the same as with spine you need a special runtime package and once it is installed you'll be able to import and play your dragonbones animations i didn't see any major differences at the first glance so in order to try and settle this i've decided to take a closer look at the game engine support and the api documentation first off apparently spine supports more game engines than dragon bones and that's already a big advantage also after looking into the dragonbones api documentation i came to a conclusion that it has a very basic functionality in general especially if compared to spine i'm sorry but it's just that spine unity runtime supports some really cool features for instance you can turn your spine rig into a ragdoll when the character dies that for me is a huge yes sorry dragon bones but i have to say that's another one for spine well now that we are pretty much done with the animation process it's time to go back to the pricing issue of each software while the professional license of spine will cost you a biting 300 dollars at least for now dragon bones is completely free you can't really get a better offer than that so dragon bones wins the last round so from what we saw in this video dragon bones does not offer as many solutions and advanced animation features as spine pro but that's the thing those are advanced features dragon bones is still a good animation software that was really fun to play around with and if you are a beginner animator it could be a good fit for you since it is free with dragon bones you can learn simple character rigging and simple mesh animation and you can start bringing your characters to life but if you plan to make professional animations i'd still recommend going with spine bra it allows producing higher quality animations much easier and faster than dragon bones which means that if you're a freelancer you'll be able to fulfill more customer orders and if you're an indie developer you can release your game sooner i really hope this video did justice to both spine pro and dragon bones i also help it make the comparison between the two clearer if you think that i missed something please let me know in the comments below thank you so much for watching and see you next time

Channel: Think Citric

Views: 84,216

Keywords: spine 2d, dragonbones, spine pro, spine vs dragonbones, spine 2d vs dragon bones, dragon bones, dragon bones animation, spine tutorial, spine tutorial for beginners, spine animation, spine to unity, animation, spine 2d tutorial, spine 2d animation, think citric, game development, game dev, spine mesh animation, spine rigging tutorial, 2d game animation, spine 2d pro, spine 2d animation for games, dragonbones vs spine, dragonbones pro, dragonbones tutorial, spine 2d rigging

Id: vHDeI-D74k0

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020