Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Spine vs Fusion Character Animator, the Slant community recommends Spine for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D animation tools for game development?” Spine is ranked 2nd while Fusion Character Animator is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Spine is:
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Integration libraries support most engines
Spine provides integrated modules for 14 major engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, LOVE, MonoGame, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, libgdx, Corona, and more. Generic runtime libraries are also available for C, C++, Objective C, C#, JavaScript, Lua and ActionScript 3. Dozens of third party libraries support additional targets.
Pro Simplified UI allows for an easy learning curve
No-nonsense workflow allows you to create your artwork in programs much better suited for the task like Illustrator and Inkscape for example, while Spine itself focuses only on the important task of skeletal animation.
Pro Allows for easy use of artwork from third party programs
Spine's developers provide scripts which makes exporting artwork from third party programs much easier to do.
Pro Community-driven feature roadmap
Esoteric Software maintains public Waffle issue trackers to help plan and prioritize feature additions.
Pro Funded via Kickstarter
Spine received resounding support from Kickstarter backers, beating its pledge goal by over 5 times. A second successful Kickstarter added meshes and other important features.
Pro Price high for this product
Pro Editor module
Sprite art can be edited within FCA with paint/draw, tint and scaling tools.
Pro Requires no knowledge of sprite animation
FCA provides a collection of pre-built animations, and only requires the user to supply images for each body part.
Pro Works with most popular game engines
Fusion Character Animator is compatible with MMF2, Fusion 2.5, Scirra Construct, GameDev, RPGMaker VX Ace, Game Maker and Unity 2D.
Pro Pixelate Me for retrogaming
Sprites can be automatically reduced and pixelated, with additional control over the color palette.
Pro Easy to manage generated pictures and folder
Export file manager can manager or erase easily generated pictures.
Cons
Con Spine Professional is expensive
Spine Essential includes nearly all features, except IK, weights, and meshes. Spine Professional is expensive, though it does give all future updates for life (Spine is updated very often).
Con Requires EVERY developer to have a license
Ever developer needs a license, not just the animator, or an overall license for the project. The license agreement is extremely restrictive.
Con Doesn't support gamemaker 2.3
Con No integration for lesser known engines
Spine does not directly support some game engines, such as Construct 2 or Clickteam Fusion.
Con Basic tool
The program is not a powerful tool, you can only choose from a small selection of pre-set animations and pre-drawn sprites.
Con Humanoid sprites only
FCA uses a single human-shaped skeletal model, and all the provided animations are for human movement.
