Adobe Animate can trace its origins back to 2, when it was known as FutureSplash Animator. That was before Macromedia acquired it and renamed it Flash. Before you run for the hills, this is not a sneaky way to try to bring Flash back. Instead, Adobe took the best parts of this long-deceased platform and turned it into a massive XNUMXD animation tool, updating and improving it along the way.
Adobe Animate: costs and plans
- This is Adobe's frequent subscription model
Unsurprisingly, Adobe Animate is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription package. That means if you've already paid for it, it's in your arsenal ready to explore.
- Adobe Creative Cloud subscription options:
- Twelve month plan - €9.99 per month (€119.88 total cost) (opens in a new tab)
For those who don't know, there are a variety of Creative Cloud subscription plans. You can subscribe to Adobe Animate as a single, standalone application. It is also free or as a part of the Creative Cloud All Apps package. This combines the animation application with more than twenty other tools, including Adobe Dimension 3D modeling and rendering software and After Effects, the company's Hollywood-grade VFX software.
We've explored the different costs and discounts in our guide Download Animate: How to try Adobe Animate for free or with Creative Cloud
And you won't need the best video editing computer for high performance here. When it comes to specs, any modern Mac or PC with two GB of RAM and four GB of storage space should be able to handle Animate.
Adobe Animate: interface
- Simple interface to learn if you know other Adobe applications
The best thing about Adobe's suite of applications is that if you're used to one, you'll quickly become familiar with another. And this is uniquely true with graphics applications.
Launch Animate and you'll see an instantly identifiable splash screen with models taking up most of the interface to help you get started quickly. Don't worry if you need to create something more custom—click More Presets to personalize your chart with pixel-perfect precision.
There's also an introductory window that appears every time you start the app (until you tell it not to), giving you a series of tutorials to help you understand how it all works. These and more can also be found in the Learn section, though unfortunately many are "not free right now".
Once you're in the interface itself, you'll find identifiable tools in a sidebar on the left, with a properties section on the right, and the box that takes up most of the interface. Your timeline and layers are now displayed.
In general, Adobe Animate almost resembles a mix of Photoshop and Premiere Pro, or a very stripped down version of After Effects.
Adobe Animate: Tools
- Easy tools that deliver surprisingly good results, as long as you work within the limits
The animation offered by Adobe Animate is of the 2D variety - think social media promotional ads and simple side-scrolling games and you'll have a rough idea of what you can achieve.
Keep in mind, however, that animation software is built to make the process easier for you and therefore doesn't come with a host of features and options that a more advanced tool like After Effects would have. It's more like the Adobe Express of motion graphics. However, what it lacks in utility and power, it makes up for in ease of use.
Perhaps the best part of Animate is its Asset Warp tool. This allows you to add movement to an object that was not originally developed for such a process, such as an image, for example. Of course, the layer you're going to work on should have a transparent background, but with this setup you're just using the Asset Warp tool to create a sort of exoskeleton. This tells Animate which parts of the object can be moved and how the different sections are connected to each other.
Now, there are limits to it. If the object you're working on is a person, for example, and you can't see their left arm because of the angle it was drawn at, it won't magically appear if you warp the object over time. The clue is in the name: warp. The object is disfigured according to this exoskeleton that you have created to give the illusion of movement. Despite such an obvious restriction, the results are surprisingly good and you can have fun creating simple animations.
Animating an object is done through the traditional keyframing process: set a start point, move along the timeline, set an end point, and Animate calculates the difference in location, size, orientation, and movement of the object between these two images, and does the rest of the work for .
You'll find helpful tools like the traditional visual onion skin mode, which helps you see the difference between two frames, so you can easily see what needs to be worked on and what can be left alone.
When it comes to exporting your work, you can make an mp4 video or an animated gif and share it directly on social media to Twitter and YouTube. These options are quite limited, but nothing prevents you from manually downloading them elsewhere.
Adobe Animate: new features
- Nice set of improvements to the awesome Warp tool
It's good to see that Adobe has continually improved its animation software, introducing a host of new and useful features.
Flexibones really caught our attention for the two thousand and twenty-three edition. This works in conjunction with the Asset Warp tool and tells the program whether a particular section of an object is Hard, Soft, or Flexible, giving you more realistic movement between keyframes.
Envelope Deformer is a very flexible way to deform the edges of an object using Bezier controllers. It's not something you couldn't have done before, but it makes things easier, gives you more control, and saves you time—a win-win situation.
As with all software, Animate is a relentless work in progress, with new features being added on a regular basis. However, we were quite surprised that it still doesn't support the HEIC image format, which is slowly becoming more ubiquitous.
Mac users may also be frustrated by the Windows-like behavior of stopping the program by clicking the red button in the window (as opposed to that action which simply closes the file, leaving the running application ready to open a new one). ). But the two drawbacks are minor for an entertaining, versatile and flexible software.
Adobe Animate: Dashboard
Swipe to scroll horizontally Row zero - Cell zero Row zero - Cell 1 Row zero - Cell two upgrades and adds in progress4Should I buy?
Buy it if...
You need to work on basic 2D animation, and you need software that is flexible and not overly complex.
Don't buy it if...
You need more options, more control, and more functionality on a par with After Effects or certain Adobe After Effects alternative options.
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