Procreate Dreams 4+

Disappointing start.

I’ll start this off by saying that as a professional artist that moved from cintiq/photoshop to Procreate/ iPad I am a big supporter of Procreate and the whole team. What the team does for the art community is incredible. However, I am mighty disappointed with the launch of Procreate dreams and it’s a program I’ve been so hyped about from the moment it was announced.

Lots of features that were assumed to be in the program are not currently there, making it in fact easier to animate in Procreate (which was already very clunky) than in a program that is supposedly meant for animation. Tools like lasso/liquify/pressure curve editor/double tap of the ipencil/no colour editing such as hue. No way to make a perfectly straight line, a feature that was a BIG part of Procreate and MANY more things tbh.
What makes me extra sad is that it feels as though this information was purposely omitted by Procreate team as well as the people that did reviews of the software prior to it’s release. Never really showing how they got from A to B in their videos and a lot of “let me load up what I did earlier”.
As it stands, this program is more useful to influencers and video editors than it is to anyone who is interested in animation. And I don’t know if this was done on purpose, but I’m just sad. I wish the team was upfront about the lack of tools and told us ahead of time that we’d need to wait for them to be implemented. This is unacceptable imo.

A good first step, but far from expectations

I am an illustrator and a traditional 2D artist, so the reveal of Dreams was an extraordinary feeling, I quite enjoy using procreate and consider it one of my favourite pieces of software, so to see you working on an app that quite heavily caters to my speciality was cause for celebration, though now I believe I should’ve displayed a little more caution.

One of the many things I enjoy about procreate is its brush functionality, the control and extra features built in (Such as the ruler), so to see many of those features missing in dreams was quite disappointing, on another hand as a British animator, we work at 25 FPS here, so to see that we are unable to set a custom fps excludes quite a large demographic here. Finally, and this is just an extra, I do wish that there was more parity between Dreams and Procreate, I’ve transferred my brushes manually though it would be nice if they shared their own library so I could adjust my pen between workstations, something to consider for the future I suppose.

All in all, though I am sad to see all the features I loved in procreate missing I will still use the app from time to time but will likely stick to using desktop apps such as Toonboom and TVpaint, I happily await to see what you will do with this app moving forward and hope to have a much better experience then. Thank you for all your work.

Developer Response ,

Hi Killa Wub - Procreate Dreams will continue improving! Our work hasn't finished with release version, it is just starting! For this reason, we invite you to share with us your suggestion through our site https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3. Thanks for your support! 🩷

Potential, but incomplete

This has a lot of potential to be amazing, I’m looking forward to seeing how it changes over the coming months but I feel this was released prematurely. The frame by frame features are lacking, there are lots of basic things missing at the moment that make frame by frame more difficult than it needs to be, like no selection tools in draw mode, no intuitive timeline ripple editing of drawings, even no way to easily move drawings around on the timeline without having to group and ungroup drawings, which takes 3 extra steps than it should. I feel like they could take a page out of TVPaints or Adobe Animates book in terms of timeline functionality for frame by frame animation.

That said, the flexibility of the program seems very exciting and the interface is very sleek. I feel like some functionality or ease of use has been sacrificed in order to have a clean ui. As i said, I see so much potential and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this shapes up. Hopefully the developers address these issues!