Over the weekend, Esoteric Software released version 3.7 of their Spine animation software. Spine enables you to create complex 2D animations using a bone and mesh based workflow, much like working and animating in 3D. It is a software that we have covered several times on this site including this step by step tutorial as well as in our recent round-up of bone based animation packages. The 3.7 release brings several new features and improvements including new audio support, improved exporters, new skinning functionality and a new C++ based runtime.
Major new features of the 3.7 release include:
- Audio support
- Stretchy, compressed and uniform inverse kinematics
- Mesh whitespace stripping
- Revamped exporters(Gif, APNG, Range and Crop limiting)
- Pixel rendering
- Skin combining
- Type to Search
- Skin duplication
- Vertex copy/paste
- CLI improvements
- Runtime improvements
- New C++ based spine runtime (will power UE and Cocos)
You can learn a great deal more about this release on the Spline blog or by watching the video embedded below. In addition to the new 3.7 release, a Spine Web Player was also released, with the announcement being lost in the holiday noise!