#me breaking out the jeweler's loupe to analyze some tiny anime gifs

[egophiliac]

hiii i have a question about your cheka !! did you use the professional or essential version of spine for it (im assuming you're using spine??) :0000 was debating on making some self indulgent sprites myself and i didnt know which version to buy

I use Professional! I don't use it as a professional anymore, but it works just as well for small silly things like fan-chibis. :D personally, I think the Professional features are absolutely essential (despite the cheaper version being called Essentials. it's a lie.) especially if you want to do a Twst-style chibi --I've stared at those little dudes for a looooong time trying to figure out how they work, and they're definitely using meshes, if not also constraints.

meshes are the big dealbreaker for me, since they let you weight the image to bones, and get actual deformation and bendiness:

(ignore the feather floating away, I didn't wanna fix it for the example :')

and of course, constraints are the other big thing! IK is the most obvious one:

but there's also ones that allow relative manipulation of other bones, paths, and all kinds of other fun stuff! I learned about keyable path spacing a while back and it absolutely blew my mind that you can just...DO that. god.

uhhhh yeah, sorry, I'm a Spine stan! I think Professional >>>> Essentials, although the price difference is, unfortunately, pretty steep (if it helps, I believe you can upgrade at any time for the difference in price, and for individuals it's a one-time purchase with perpetual free updates). it has a little bit of a learning curve, but once I got used to the UI I found it really intuitive, and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials!

tl;dr it's pretty expensive if you aren't using it professionally -- and you could definitely get good results using Essentials if you're clever about rigging -- but Professional is far and away the superior version.