Skeleton2D, bones and deforming polygons

Help Animation
1

Godot Version

4.4

Question

I am curious if anyone on this forum uses the Skeleton2D feature, which uses Bone2D objects to deform Polygon2D objects. The system, as described in the docs, appears to be full-featured, and there’s no caveats, no mention of “quirks” in the system, no need for any workarounds, apparently. But in trying to use it (particularly in comparison to the cutout animation system), it feels, incomplete, not well-tested, buggy and unreliable.

I would love to be wrong about this. There are a handful of example videos on the web, where it appears to work just fine. Then again, there are plenty of comments below the videos that support my point, Can’t get it to work, or this feature or that feature doesn’t work like it does in the video, etc.

If it worked the way it’s supposed to, I should be able to go in and do a very basic animation and confirm that the feature is solid. But in trying do this very thing, a simple arm that bends at the elbow, I wind up tearing my hair out. I’m happy to go into details and post pictures that illustrate my point, but I’m going to wait and see if anyone responds to this, because I have the feeling that very few people are using this feature, for (what seems like to me) obvious reasons.

Again, I would love to be wrong because I love Godot. I worked with Unity for years but now it seems very bloated and overgrown. I would hate to have to port my last six months of work over to Unity because I can’t get these basic 2d animations to work. Please, please, please, if you are using this feature successfully, please respond. The docs need to be updated for this one (for 4.4) and I’m happy to work on that, but not if the feature is as problematic as I think it is.

2

I have this problem - Why do my polygons disappear when I assign the skeleton to them? but it persists evfen with bone weights assigned…
So can’t say I use it successfully!

3

@Thomas_Nicol Well, I have not seen that problem before. The only thing that it reminds me of, is the case of having the textures disappear from the polygons after they are created in the polygon editor. Which, I believe, I’ve always been able to fix by doing the Overwrite Rest Pose on the Skeleton2D. But I’ve never seen the polygons themselves disappear.

Are using v. 4.4? Are you bringing in your own textures or are you only using the robot examples that all the tutorials seem to use? One of my biggest frustrations is how sensitive the bones system seems to be to texture size. In my experience, larger textures make the bones act crazy, they start to rotate around in 3D space and regularly refuse to resize, no matter what you do.