Hi,

I'm currently considering art options for a project and am hoping to use a mix of skin deformation and skeleton-based animation.

The problem is I'm hoping to achieve that for a 'top-down' type of game (think early Final Fantasy or Zelda games).

I've seen Spine, and what it can do, but everything I see about it seems to work only for side-view perspectives and I have yet to see anything credible achieved from a more top-down perspective, or at least, leveraging the up/down directions.

Has anyone made or seen something like that?

True, most of the animations I can find from it is a side view, however if it can make those animations there is noting that will stop it from making top down animations.

All you will need is some top-down art and a artist who knows how to animated it, giving it a try yourself isn't a bad idea.

Spline has a free, trail. I will always recommend using the trail to see if it fits your needs.

Alternate software would be Blender, it's a free 3D modeling software that can do any kind of animation if you know how. Because it's 3D it's easy to get different angles.

If you can't make the art yourself find an artist that can.

Thanks Ashaman, I actually saw this as well in my search, and it being the only thing I actually found made me feel like the restrictions uncovered meant by news.

Luckily someone pointed out DelversDrop.com which has decent top down anims made in Spine and they appear to work alright.

Will pickup the trial version and see for myself. The Pro version is a bit steep (and required for deformation) as we'd be more than one animator most likely, but it's worth a shot if it can improve our pipeline and allow us to do something funky ;)