So this week procreate released their latest app, Procreate Dreams. I've been very excited for the potential of this software. I use Procreate daily and they’ve really set a precedent as one of the best artists tools out there, so it’s so exciting to see them turn that high quality potential to an animation focused application.
Earlier this year I did an animation test for my personal project and i really found myself fighting with the limitations of the base procreate software. Seeing the features this app promises it was looking like it might solve all my issues.
Well now that's its out I've had a day or two to start playing with it. Here's the first few animations I've done in the software.
So does it solve all my problems and is it really the animation software we've all been hoping for...
not quite yet, but its close!
There is a lot to improve with the software at the moment and some basic functionality that its missing.
Unfortunately the drawing side of the app is a lot more stripped back than I was expecting, I think everyone was assuming that this would be at least the same as base procreate but I guess in order to fit all the other animation requirements they had to remove things. The big shame here with this is that you can animate and use these features in base procreate so we know its not impossible to have them.
I think it should be a priority for them to start getting all these feature implemented back into the software as soon as possible or they might loose a lot of people.
Of the original features that are missing the most vital would probably selection tool. It makes it very tricky to make edits without this.
The software itself is doing some very impressive things that I'm sure is why the features were missing in favour of. For example in draw mode they seem to have a very large almost unlimited canvas space outside the frame, this is great for when you need a drawing to come in and out of the shot, in base procreate it will crop anything that goes outside of its canvas space. This seems to me like the biggest processing requirement to maintain along with how it now remembers your undo history another thing thing that is probably taking up a lot of processing power.
Another options that I don't fully understand why its in here but I feel must be related to getting a animation software to work on an iPad is the brush scaling feature, its making brushes that people were familiar with react differently, and while its seems fine for me so far I reckon is likely something they needed to implement in relation to the giant canvas feature. You have to remember that the biggest limitation of the base procreate was the layer limitation and this is a software that literally requires loads of layers so I'm sure they are having to do a lot behind the scene to get that to work.
Now in terms of actually animating in the software, I haven't got into anything too complicated yet with multiple layers or audio yet but its looking like the support to handle all that is in here ready to go which is amazing.
My biggest request that needs implementing is in the flipbook mode it really needs to have an option to flip between drawn frames not just the next frame as currently if you time and space out your animation before you start to break it up with breakdowns and in-betweens you cant flip between the drawings which ends up making the flip book section useless to me. This is really the most important feature for me right now!
The app has a lot of features that are lower priority for me at the moment such as its key framing and recording movement tools which its super awesome they have but with some of the limits of the traditional hand drawn animation side its a little frustrating that that is where they put their initial efforts.
Similar to base procreate the app relies on your knowledge of specific UI and gestures so its vital you read the manual or watch some tutorials as these buttons that don't look remotely like buttons. This is fairly normal for procreate though and just something you can get use to.
Overall it really doesn't need several updates to get to a really good place but I am very optimistic, Procreate has had many updates with huge improvements and has shown how committed they are to improvement so I really think all these point will be addressed.
Even if they didn't do any further updates, the current software will certainly allow me to more easily continue with my personal project so its already a huge win for me.
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