Procreate Dreams

[neonnoodle]

The developers of Procreate have just introduced their animation app, called Procreate Dreams.


Based on the demo video, it looks like it supports hand-drawn and keyframed actions, camera moves, and audio. It looks like the engine heavily uses the newer iPad GPUs to improve realtime playback. This is a big deal considering how fanatical the userbase of Procreate is, and how many requests for animation features have filled the user forums.

I still have a first-generation iPad Pro without a dedicated GPU, and I wonder how it'll perform on this hardware.

[Peter Wassink]

Ouf very sexy clip!
And Yes the Procreate drawing tools are very very nice (dare i say... nicer then tvpaints), and indeed already a lot of people are using it.
This is big competition and will for sure soon dominate the market for beginning talent and on the move animation solutions.

[neonnoodle]

As much as I love working in TVP, these days I work on an iPad for rough animation, and go to Blender for cleanup/color/fx/compositing. I expect that Procreate Dreams will replace Callipeg/RoughAnimator in my workflow. It may sound nuts, but just having TILT SUPPORT for the Apple Pencil is a game-changer. None of the existing animation apps support it or have as rich a brush engine as Procreate.

As a compositing tool, Blender is way faster than TVP on my desktop.

[Jet]

Seems impressive at first, but I hope they don't forget basics like shift & trace, reusing drawings on the timeline or a proper fill tool for animators otherwise it seems more like a social media tool to showcase yourself using it rather than for real work, we didn't really see much 'animator' features, it was a conference about a user interface so far.

[D.T. Nethery]

Seems impressive at first, but I hope they don't forget basics like shift & trace, reusing drawings on the timeline or a proper fill tool for animators otherwise it seems more like a social media tool to showcase yourself using it rather than for real work, we didn't really see much 'animator' features, it was a conference about a user interface so far.

I was wondering about that too , then I saw the short film they commissioned from Aaron Blaise. He did the animation and coloring entirely in ProCreate Dreams for this piece. I've been told that Aaron is developing a course on "Animating in ProCreate".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJKEhmQoKGw


Interestingly, in the comments someone asks: "Will you be moving to ProCreate Dreams or stay with TVPaint?"
Aaron answers: "Different platforms and different applications. I will happily use both."

Someone else asks: "So Procreate Dreams can do frame by frame animation ? I thought it was more of a motion graphics/After Effects type tool?"
Aaron Blaise answers: "It absolutely can do frame by frame."

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[Jet]

I tried using Dreams on a personal project, but it's terrible for animating with! So many basic functions for an animator are missing that I question who exactly they were getting feedback from? Because it certainly isn't anyone actively working in the industry now, it could only be from retired or internet personalities.

- Gestures are infuriating, difficult to remember, I jump all over the timeline randomly
- re-timing drawings is awkward, no 2's or 3's commands, small tolerances for active areas my man hand fingers can't physically touch without touching a hundred other things
- No re-use, there's no 'cel bank', you can't instance a drawing on the timeline at all, only unique duplicates
- No shift & trace, no selection tools of any kind
- Worst fill tool user experience in existence, you must drag the color onto the region you want to fill, if I had to do that for an entire project my arm would no doubt break off at some point
- Onion skin is frame only, not instances (since there is no instance concept, I presume?), max of 4
- Flipbook panel is gigantic, baked in 'drop shadow' border around the panel so you can't dock it neatly against the screen edge, wasted screen space, it's also not sensitive enough it takes too much movement to roll through the frames, doesn't make sense that it shows an infinite loop of drawings in the flipbook so you don't know where beginning and end is
- Can't adjust brushes or stylus pressure sensitivity curve
- When using a filter, the settings panel is opened in the middle of the entire screen so you can't see your work, just ridiculous

It was some nice marketing, certainly no "game changer". Maybe a nice thing to pose with (as I predicted, if the videos coming out are anything to go by), iPad on table: check, plant: check, apple pencil neatly placed to the side: check, gradated led soft light: check, cup of coffee: check...

The good thing is the price and their marketing/word of mouth, the way it's designed will appeal to beginners and casuals maybe, and hopefully it gets more people into animation although I question it considering how spectacularly they missed the mark on the basics.

Anyway, end of rant!

[D.T. Nethery]

Thanks for the review.

It seems that ProCreate's marketing team is very clever and they have done a masterful job of creating a lot of buzz about Dreams (and the pricing is very attractive ... I think many people are willing to spend $20 to see what all the fuss is about and give it a try. I haven't purchased it yet, but I admit I probably will ... even with the issues you point out. But I'm in no rush ... I hope maybe they will introduce some of those missing features soon ?) For now I think Callipeg is better for animating on iPad. (Callipeg has a script for exporting work from Callipeg to open it in TVPaint, which is handy). I mention Callipeg to people and get a blank stare. They don't know what it is. Effective marketing can not be underestimated.

It will be interesting to see how responsive the ProCreate developers are to receiving and quickly implementing feature requests. I will keep an eye on it. As I've mentioned before, I'm not that comfortable working on the iPad because of the small screen size, I like the larger screen size of my Cintiq (and if I could afford it I would buy a bigger one!) Apple Pencil is great to draw with in terms of responsiveness, but I don't think I want to do heavy-duty work on the iPad for long-term projects.

- re-timing drawings is awkward, no 2's or 3's commands
- No re-use, there's no 'cel bank', you can't instance a drawing on the timeline at all, only unique duplicates
- No shift & trace, no selection tools of any kind
- Onion skin is frame only, not instances (since there is no instance concept, I presume?)
- Can't adjust brushes or stylus pressure sensitivity curve

Those missing features make me hesitant to buy it now. I will wait.

I am especially surprised by "- Can't adjust brushes or stylus pressure sensitivity curve" because it seems to me that ProCreate's main appeal is their incredible array of brushes (in the main ProCreate app). Of course, many of those fancy brushes are probably not practical for animating ?

[neonnoodle]

I agree completely with the above review. And seeing as how both Callipeg and RoughAnimator (which recently added shift and trace) have been developed with real workflows in mind, Dreams is even more disappointing. The fact that there are no selection or transform tools is shocking.

[ghin]

I agree with the review above as well. I initially wanted to replace Adobe Animate completely with Procreate Dreams but it was so disappointing on release. I am hoping that the developers make it something worth using quickly. I loved Procreate as a drawing app.

[cgmodeler]

Bought it to try it but it was disappointing to say the least, there are a few features that come in handy and have the Procreate DNA in it like:
- The lasso editing for the timeline and intuitive playback controls,
- the drag and throw to play the layer instantly
- Zoom management of the timeline with fingers is pretty cool
- Video layer works great


All the bad:+
- Clunky UI, nothing like procreate, too much text everywhere, no intuitiveness, Giant icons that take up almost 1/3 or the workspace which you cannot hide BTW.
- Hacky use of filters as track settings (If you want opacity for your track you don't have a setting for it so you must add a filter and then set the opacity)
- Flipbook overlay can't be hidden, as soon as you hide it it goes back to the timeline
- UI duplication, clicking on Close flipbook and done do the same
- No per frame timeline settings, basically you're left with HH,MM,SS for your project settings, (As if you were going to animate 1 Hour of animation on an ipad app)
- No instances, everything works on frames so flipbook's onion skin is useless if you already timed your drawing
- No custom sizes for project presets
- No brush editing
- no canvas flipping
- No lasso or selection tools or even move tools on drawing mode (all procreate should be here or at least the best of it)
- No page frame flipping, it would be cool to see two three or even four fingers flipping between frame as if you were with real paper, curved motion (wishful thinking here).
- And many many more...

So I would recommend to wait until it's polished, I haven't explored the export format but it seems they use transparent PNG and JSON as their export.