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?