Procreate Dreams

[Ronbo]

If you're an artist with an iPad, no doubt you're familiar with Procreate for drawing, painting, and even limited animation. In late November they are going to release an interesting new animation app called Procreate Dreams. It looks awesome. If you're curious you can check out the keynote event.

https://procreate.com/dreams

[Greenlaw]

The Procreate team presented a demonstration of Procreate Dreams at my workplace last Tuesday, and I got to play with it for a little bit.

The 'Procreate' part in Dreams really looks and feels like Procreate. I think they said they rebuilt the engine to make it more efficient for FBF animation, but they kept the same look and UI, so if you already know Procreate, it's very familiar.

Some of the same gestures work in the timeline area, like two-finger undo and panning. and there are some new ones, like three-finger pan to shrink and expand the timeline. It's all very intuitive! Well, except I didn't figure out how to create a second frame. At that point, I'd been playing for over 10 minutes and felt I should let someone else try it.

Dreams has three ways to animate:

1. FBF
2. Keyframe (layer transforms only)
3. Performance

Performance means it can record live puppeteering motions for layers/elements. Kinda gimmicky, IMO, but they showed some clever uses for it. Because touch motions can be shakey, they have filters for smoothing out keyframes.

Dream's mesh warper is just a basic grid, pretty simple compared to what we have in Moho. But it has it though, which is cool.

I saw two shortcomings: 1.) Color depth is limited to 8-bit...was hoping it was 16-bit, which is what TV productions are done in nowadays. And 2.) no 3D environment or camera, so any parallax effect is cheated without real z-depth. It sounded like these were features they wanted to add eventually.

It's all still very impressive...very fluid and polished. Oh, and they still have almost a month of development before release, so it will likely be even better than what I was playing with.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm off to pre-order my copy.

$20! Can you believe it?

[Greenlaw]

BTW, I've been a Procreate fan for over 10 years and my second Moho animation, Hearts Like Fists, used a lot of backgrounds and characters created in Procreate. So, I'm very excited about the release of Dreams! I'm already thinking about how to combine it with my Moho animations.

[Shanty Baba]

Yes, I am excited about Procreate Dreams as well.
I think this app, with Procreate’s popularity, will introduce animation to a whole new range of people , who when they want to do more sophisticated animation will come to programs like Moho.

[Ronbo]

Thanks for sharing your hands-on experience, Greenlaw. As they said and as you alluded to, this is only version 1.0 and they plan to continue developing and adding to it so there are more exciting things to come. It's especially cool that all Procreate brushes can be used in Dreams. I've already pre-ordered it.

Shanty, introducing lots of new people to animation is what Aaron Blaise is excited about. He's looking forward to seeing what people create with Dreams. And he is a classic Disney FBF animator, but very willing to embrace new technologies. I'm willing to bet that he will be producing some Dreams tutorials, as he has with TVPaint.

[JoelMayer]

Pre-ordered as well. Tbh all i want is Shift and Trace and selective Onion Skins via Drawing Markers and i'm more than happy. Hopefully in 2.0, if enough classical animators make a fuss!

I'm in favour for it to stay as simple as possible because the older i get the more i realize that simplicity is the ultimate feature.