How Procreate Dreams promises to revolutionise the world of animation

Since it was founded in 2011, the digital illustration app Procreate has become a go-to creative resource for aspiring and established artists all over the world. Offering a range of intuitive features that help turn blank canvases into stunning digital artworks, Procreate also allows users to bring their works to life through its Animation Assist feature. This tool has become one of the app’s most popular, and over the years many users have demanded more animation tools from the Procreate team. Not ones to ignore the desires of their community, the team came up with an even better answer: Procreate Dreams. Available to pre-order now, this new app promises to take everything that users loved about the Animation Assist feature and bring it to the next level.

From the very start Procreate has championed accessible creativity, helping those without the technical know-how to create high-quality art – and it was no different this time around. The original app took all of the essential tools needed to craft beautiful digital illustrations and packaged them in a simple, intuitive interface, and Procreate Dreams does the same thing with animation. 2D animation has long been a time-consuming and arduous process that requires creatives to jump between multiple pieces of complex software, some of which are slow and clunky, but in Procreate Dreams, creatives can edit, play, keyframe and draw all in one app, in real time. It’s full of simplicity.

At the heart of this experience is the way the app has embraced physical touch, allowing users to create animations in a smooth and intuitive fashion. Two-finger taps undo previous actions, pinches can be used to zoom in on the screen, and the Multi-touch Timeline enables you to edit and adjust your animations using simple gestures. There is even a feature called Performing, which allows users to automatically add keyframes to a project and record their own actions with a few simple swipes of their fingers. As a result, the creative process becomes less about technical details and more about improvisation and pure expression. Creatives of all kinds can animate quickly with emotion and feeling rather than spending hours understanding easing, graphs and timing, making the overall experience fun and intuitive.

Naturally, such a simple animation process lends itself to fast-paced creativity, and it’s easy to imagine projects quickly growing to a large scale. Thankfully, Procreate has also accounted for this, developing its new app in such a way that files open and close at lightning speed, no matter the size. This may seem insignificant compared with Procreate Dreams' other offerings, but for those who have worked with heavy animation files in the past and found themselves staring listlessly at a frozen screen, the ability to instantly open one is a truly welcome addition. Not only that, but even if you’re working with hundreds of drawings, keyframes, audio and video files, the app's new painting and compositing engine renders everything in real time, so you’ll never be kept waiting.

For fans of Procreate’s original suite of digital illustration tools, the good news is that Procreate Dreams will retain all of these. The library of brushes that were such a hit in years gone by will return, along with other drawing and painting tools that will help users hone their visual style. “One of the key points is that in a lot of animation products, the drawing tools are kind of an afterthought,” notes Procreate co-founder and CEO James Cuda, “[but] in Procreate Dreams, drawing and painting are a core part of the experience, [because] they impact what the animations can look like too.” He continues: “So I'm really excited to see what's going to happen when people get the power of the full library of Procreate brushes – what are they going to make? That’s one of the most exciting things for us.”

Procreate Dreams will be available to pre-order on the App Store from October 27 for a single-time purchase of £19.99, and will be officially released on November 22.