Skins and events

#Skins

A skin is a set of attachments that can be swapped as a whole: outfits, armor sets, color variants, or several characters sharing one skeleton and its animations. The same animation plays on every skin.

#How skins work

The default skin holds every attachment that is not in a named skin. Attachments added while the default skin is active belong to every skin.
A named skin adds attachments by slot and name. When a game shows skin knight, a slot looking for its attachment helmet finds the knight's helmet.
Animations refer to attachments by name, so an animation that swaps hand to hand_fist works with every skin that has those names.

#Creating and filling a skin

In the tree's Skins section, press ＋ New. The new skin becomes active.
Select a slot and add images or shapes (＋ Add image to skin '…' in the inspector). They go into the active skin. Slots show skin attachments with the skin's name in brackets.
Click a skin in the tree to make it active and see what it contains.

Setting	Meaning
Name	The skin's name, as games refer to it.
Active	Which skin the editor shows. Make active switches.
Attachments	How many attachments it has; Attachments by slot lists them.
Bones	Bones marked "skin required" that this skin turns on (Use selected).
Constraints	Constraints marked "skin required" that this skin turns on.
Duplicate	A copy of the skin to make a variant from.

#Skin bones and constraints

Some bones and constraints only make sense for some skins: a cape bone with physics for the knight, a tail for the cat. Mark them Skin required, then add them to the skins that use them. In other skins they do nothing.

#Skins when rendering

File ▸ Render animation lists the skins: tick several to render each animation with each skin in one batch. See Film.

#Events

An event is a named moment in an animation that a game reacts to: a footstep sound, a hit frame, a particle burst. Events carry optional values.

The settings of Rigbytron's slash event — The slash event fired by Rigbytron's release animation

#Creating an event

In the tree's Events section, press +. Select it to set its default values:

Setting	Meaning
Name	What the game listens for.
Int, Float, String	Values passed to the game.
Audio	The path of a sound to play.
Volume, Balance	How to play it (balance: −1 left to 1 right).

#Keying events

Switch to Animate mode, choose the animation, go to the frame, select the event and press ⚑ Key at frame N. Each key can override the values above. Keys lists the event's keys in the current animation; Delete this key removes one. Event keys also appear in the dopesheet.

#In the runtimes

state.addListener({
  event: (entry, e) => {
    if (e.name === 'footstep') playSound(e.audio ?? 'step.wav', e.volume);
  },
});

See Runtimes.