Procreate is the go to drawing/painting program for me and many others, its clean interface, fantastic price with lifelong free updates and ever expanding features has made it the choice of pros and hobbyists and puts them all on an even playing field. Its been around I think 15 years and while it started out a little wonky the makers have been attentive to users and determined to democratize art. When they announced a new product only a couple months ago, it was a mystery what is might be. Well, now we know and it appeared on my ipad when i woke up one morning this week and i was very excited to try it out.
The idea is to democratize animation in the same way Procreate did for art and drawing. Simple interface, professional quality output at an affordable price and again, lifetime free updates. It sort of succeeded. The performance is beyond anything else, it supports infinite undos and canvases up to 1 MILLION pixels, plays 4 K video in real time and your animations also play in real time with no need to render them first. They have stated some of these features will be making their way into Procreate soon.
With all that amazing stuff being true, it is also true that this is a 1.0 app and it’s missing not only some basic features in other apps already out there like Toon Squid, which is even cheaper, but crucial drawing features already in Procreate. While Procreate has an uncluttered interface it suffers from hiding features by making them available with gestures you need to learn that are not always intuitive and sadly Dreams has inherited some of that. The thing that surprised me the most was the lack of drawing assistance tools like being able to draw perfect lines or shapes and the lack of some effects like a glow or bloom which Procreate has. It doesn’t export to animated gif like Toon Squid.
This sounds like it is a disappointment, but it isn’t really for me overall. I expected and they were pretty upfront it was missing some important features before the release so bitching that they are not there when I knew they wouldn’t be seems dumb. The company has a very good, well earned reputation for quick updates and adding features the users want and buying it now insured me I was getting a nice price that i would never need to pay again and to begin learning at the ground level before new more complex features are added. I did the typical bouncing ball test to try it out and it took a couple tries and some you tube videos to make progress and figure out how I might use this. Was a bit frustrating but I see a lot of potential.
Animation is complex, and no matter how easy someone tries to make it, it will always be complex. This allows some simplification and will introduce new features over time that will streamline things but Procreate Dreams is made to encourage hand drawn, traditional animation techniques over other types of animation which might help keep the human touch in what you create with it.
2 comments:
Procreate hasn't been around quite that long, probably about half that. I think it debuted with the Apple Pencil. That being said, I know they'll be on top of updates like you said and I REALLY hope that we start seeing some amazing stuff from kids all over the place who take animation and make it their ow, producing shows without the need or interference from big corporate. I think your bouncing ball looks pretty cool, especially for a first attempt on brand new software.
Thanks wig! One there I didn't mention (i forgot) is that Dreams is made to work with procreate pretty tightly. You can import procreate files into it and automatically break them up into animation layers. There is basic video and audio editing as well. Procreate was released in 2011 so 12 years not 15. I was amazed that every preset format is 4K and it has no problem dealing with that. I do think people will be disappointed in it because it's the internet afterall and the hype was a little much for what we got and it's competition are pretty damn good but also pretty damn expensive!
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