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Adobe Animate CC 2017 Review and New Features
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With Adobe Animate CC 2017 the application formerly known as Flash adds a variety of new features and functionality that target animators working in a variety of fields. We review Adobe Animte CC and discuss how the new functionality impages those designing games, creating interactive content, and creating digital educational materials.
Features added in Adobe Animate CC 2017 includes support for virtual camera, the ability to export to an animated GIF, and HTML5 canvas support for reusable components. Adobe Animate CC also adds better ability to create and organize vector brushes and support for both pressure and tilt using Paint Brush. These enhancements will soon find their way into Adobe Animate training courses.
Adobe Animate CC Virtual camera
If you wish to simulate the movement of a camera in Animate CC, you can now use functionality that creates a more realistic motion graphic. This includes panning, zooming and rotating the camera in Animate CC for objects you have created or imported. This allows you to create more dramatic effects. Animate CC also adds the inverse, with the ability to zoom-out of a frame to show a larger area. The focal point can be modified as well, changing the attention or focus of a viewer, which can also be achieved using new color tints and filters. This new functionality is accessed in the Adobe Animate Camera Workspace.
Reusable components for HTML5 canvas in Animate CC
Much of the reason Adobe renamed Flash as Adobe Animate was to create a tool that could create HTML5 content without the negative association of the Flash file format. With a new name Animate did export to HTML5, but all of the functionalities for creating Flash content didn’t function when creating HTML5 content. This new update starts to remedy this by providing reusable components that can speed-up the production of animated content when designing for HTML5 Canvas.
Adobe Animate vector brushes
The latest update to Adobe Animate adds the ability to create vector brushes similar to those used in Adobe Illustrator. These can be art or pattern brushes such as those that use shapes drawn within Animate. Customized brushes can be created using vector objects directly inside the Animate CC app. The new Paint Brush tools support pressure and tilt functionality when creating strokes or lines using a pen or stylus for input on touch-sensitive device such as many Windows 10 computers. These can be art or pattern strokes with and the width can be variable and change based upon the amount of pressure applied or how the input device such as a stylus is tilted.
Exporting Animated GIFs from Adobe Animate
With a name such as Animate it’s now easy to create the most common form of animation shared online: the animated GIF. This includes optimization functionality and features in an Export Image window that is similar to those available within Photoshop and Illustrator. This includes viewing several versions of an image to fine-tune its optimization, and previewing images to determine the best settings for exporting, setting transparency, matting, and dithering if desired, as well as the ability to control the overall file size and quality. These export options can also be used to export a single frame or image as well.
Adobe Animate and After Effects integration
To better support importing content from Animate CC into After Effects, the latest version of Animate CC offers the option to publish layers as an SWF archive. This places the layers from an Animate project as independent SWF files for importing into Adobe After Effects. This functionality is only available when creating ActionScript and .FLA documents using Captivate, and not HTML5 Canvas documents.
About the author
Christopher Smith is president of American Graphics Institute. He is the co-author of Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies and more than 10 other books on design and digital publishing. He served as publisher and editor of the Digital Classroom book series, which has sold more than one million books on topics relating to InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud apps. At American Graphics Institute, he provides strategic technology consulting to marketing professionals, publishers designers, and large technology companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and HP. An expert on web analytics and digital marketing, he also delivers Google Analytics classes along with workshops on digital marketing topics. Christopher did his undergraduate studies the at the University of Minnesota, and then worked for Quark, Inc. prior to joining American Graphics Institute where he has worked for more than 20 years.