Bring mesh animation of Spine to DST!

[Aether825]

Spine is a powerful animation tool, and its animations can be converted for use in DST through dedicated utilities. Now, I'm excited to introduce a significant enhancement to this workflow.

The animation tool I've developed has added support for packing and previewing Spine mesh animations. The mesh feature is a core strength of Spine, enabling smooth animation transitions through mesh deformation and reducing the reliance on extensive frame-by-frame textures.

If you have used my tool before, I invite you to download the latest version to experience this new capability. The tool is available for both Windows and macOS systems at the link below: https://msisunny.github.io/dst-mod-tool-publisher/

Next, I will demonstrate some animation packed using the Mesh feature and briefly explain how it works.

At its core, Spine's mesh animation is a form of vertex-based shader animation. It allows the vertices of an image's mesh to follow the movement of corresponding bones through weight binding, enabling smooth and complex deformations.

Interestingly, DST's build format inherently supports vertex data. My work involved baking the mesh deformation data from Spine on a frame-by-frame basis and storing it completely within the animation file (build.bin). This approach makes it possible to drive fluid animations with rich mesh transformations using just a single texture, significantly improving both resource efficiency and visual quality.

Next, I’ll briefly explain how to pack a Spine animation using this tool. The tool currently supports Spine 3.8 and 4.2. The packing process is simple and requires just two steps:

1、Prepare Your Files: First, export your Spine project as a standard .json file. Ensure this file is placed in the same directory that contains images root folder used by your project.

2、Pack in One Step: Then, simply drag and drop the .json file into the tool’s window. It will automatically handle all the processing and packing for you.

I have also provided a sample Spine project here, which you can use to quickly try out and familiarize yourself with the entire packing workflow.

venti spine.zip 

Finally, here are a few important reminders:

1、Vertex animation generally results in much smaller file sizes compared to traditional frame-by-frame animation. However, please note: because it needs to store vertex data for every frame, the final file size can still increase significantly for longer animations or meshes with a high vertex count.

2、The ZIP file exported by the tool is a special format containing mesh data. Please do not unpack it. If extracted, the animations inside will lose their mesh properties and revert to standard frame-by-frame image animations.

3、Critical Limitation: Bank and Build Are a Matched Pair, After packing a mesh animation, the resulting animation file (bank.bin) and its texture atlas file (build.bin) are a tightly coupled, one-to-one pair. They cannot be separated or interchanged. 

Edited January 8 by Aether825

[HalfEnder776]

Nice!

[VaskalRascal]

This is insanely cool. 

[Haruhi Kawaii]

Thank you, this is a great tool with lots of useful features. I tried looking for freelance Spine animators instead of Spriter, and the results exceeded my expectations.

[Aether825]

On 3/4/2026 at 11:29 PM, Haruhi Kawaii said:

Thank you, this is a great tool with lots of useful features. I tried looking for freelance Spine animators instead of Spriter, and the results exceeded my expectations.

Nice animation!