Dragonbones (like spine but free)

Hey guys, I have been playing with Dragonbones and it works quite like spine and spriter but it's free.

It exports to json format but when I try using it in visionaire it crashes, I don't know if it has a different file structure, or if I have to activate something first, I was also wondering if I have to name the animations in certain way in order for the file to load.

By the way I don't see the json format in the character's 3D model properties, I simply choose "show all files" and select the Json file of the character.

Anyway, I think dragonbones could be a good alternative for spine or spriter since it's free.

It's probably to do with the runtime files? Spine runtime was implemented into VS source code & it's unlikely that Dragonbones or Spriter will work as they probably require completely different runtime frameworks for them to function properly.

Nice heads up for those of us who don't know about the application though, cheers.

Maybe Simon or David might consider adding support for other sprite part tools in a future build. Seems Spriter is quite popular & a lot less expensive for the pro version than Spine which is damn expensive in my opinion.

* edit #1: just looked at the website & it looks pretty nice. Html5 animation export sounds useful, so maybe that could be utilized in someway as we are supposed to have html5 export support in the upcoming next version of VS.

* edit #2: oh & it has mesh warping capabilities, very nice! very nice indeed!

sadl there is a lack of (good) documentation and tutorials. A lot on the website is still chinese.
The program itself looks very promising though

I clicked on a tutorial video via the application itself & next thing I know some guy is shouting at me in chinese. Always seems like they are shouting to me! I think the text documentation is all in English?

yeah... hurray... documentation without knowing when to use what is not satisfying here ^^. and when i want to look for tutorials (also in the web, not only on their site/app) ...




... most of them...








... lets say are not good when you dont speak chinese or just not present right now. the youtube channel of this software has only one tutorial which is 5+ minutes long. The rest keeos barely 1 minute playtime.

but the software itself looks very good. Would be painful to learn everything for myself though... meh

I guess they are just slow at documenting things, like me!

One of biggest problems with documentation is boredom & it's especially more boring when you are doing it for free. Motivation? What's that? Cause I've nae bloody idea!

Hey guys, the program is not that complicated, if you have used spine or spriter before you really won't have any problems working with dragonbones since all of them are basically the same, and there's not much to learn anyway.

You can watch the videos in youtube and have a basic understanding of how it works, and if you see video tutorials for either spine or spriter you will get basically the same knowledge.

i will see if its usefull for me. because i work at very low resolutions it might not as expected... maybe for cutscenes

Any idea why i can't export video with Dragonbones? It says something about image over memory or smtn similar. I wonder if that's my almost full c: disk or just this feature not complete.

I'll definetly gonna use Dragonbones for smaller animations just exporting frames and putting them in visionaire but i would love to be able to do videos with full scene background and use them in visionaire as vids.

Spriter also has a free version, but it has limitations - though I don't know what they are.

dorobo, the export features are kind of odd, but you could export the image frame sequences and then composite them in another application to make the videos.

AFRLme, yeah, Spriter has a free version but like you said it has limitations, last time I used it it was a mess to work with since you don't (or didn't) get a proper fps output and ended up having either too fast or too slow animations. It also doesn't have mesh deformations, they say they are working on it for Spriter 2 but that seems to be a paid feature. I personally found Dragonbones to be far better to work with than Spriter.