How to Cheat in Adobe Animate CC

Myra Ferguson, Chris Georgenes

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351652353
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Would you rather take months to learn every tool, every feature, and every concept in Adobe Animate or start right now making your own creations with just a few steps? Myra Ferguson is teaming up with Chris Georgenes to help you create great animation, bring objects to life with cool motion effects, and enhance your productivity in Animate CC!

How to Cheat in Adobe Animate CC is a goldmine of artistic inspiration, time-saving practical tips, and step-by-step walkthroughs. Let your sasquatch sunbathe, your coyote howl, and your lint spider see the light of day. With real-world projects and project source files, you can follow along and try for yourself. This book includes all NEW content and cheats for Animate CC, such as making cinemagraphs, creating a double exposure effect, speeding up the process of making real life doodles, simulating a bokeh effect, converting your documents to HTML5, and more.

Key Features

• Glimpse into the workflow of digital media and animation experts and apply practical techniques and tips to your own projects with source files, examples, and tutorials.

• Learn a myriad of tricks based on real-life working methods to help you work faster and more efficiently with new features in Adobe Animate CC and the Creative Cloud.

• Work from the problem to the solution to gain the best possible results from Animate.

1

What’s New in Animate CC

◼ Rewritten, renamed, and now released, Adobe Animate CC offers tons of new tools and output options for animators, designers, and interactive developers. Animate CC has everything you loved about Flash Professional and more, and it keeps getting better. Find a renewed sense of creativity with Animate CC.

A CLOSER LOOK AT ADOBE ANIMATE CC REVEALS SO MUCH MORE than just a name change from Flash Professional. The release of Animate CC in February 2016 delivered a smorgasbord of new drawing tools, improvements to existing tools, integration with the Creative Cloud, and a cornucopia of output options. The frequent updates through the Creative Cloud also served up some goodies since How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CC^® was written, and Adobe keeps bringing out more. As the Animate team continues to produce, this list just keeps growing. So let’s highlight some of the most significant additions and dig in!

Vector Art Brushes

SIMILAR TO Art Brushes in Illustrator, the new vector art brushes in Animate open up a world of creativity by applying a vector shape to a path. Use them to access specific shapes to be applied to a custom stroke, to re-create the appearance of various mediums, to generate banners or dividers, or to imagine your own creative uses.

1. Animate comes with several styles of vector art brushes ready for use that include arrows, simulated artistic mediums, banners, and all sorts of shapes and patterns.
   
   
   
   
   
2. The vector brushes are available with any tool that draws a stroke with the exception of the Pencil Tool Shift Y. A handy way to remember is to look for the Brush Library button in the Property panel. It will be active only for these tools.
   
3. Even though the brushes aren’t initially available with the Pencil Tool, you can modify a stroke after drawing it. Select one or more strokes with the Selection Tool, click the Brush Library button to open that panel, and choose a style to apply a vector art brush to your selection. Adjust the width of the stroke as needed in the Properties panel.
   
   
   
4. If you want to draw with the vector art brushes, use the new Paint Brush Tool Y.
   
   HOT TIP

   If you don’t find the right brush, make your own! At first, the only way to make a brush was to use Adobe Capture for iOS or Android. Now you can create your own brush within Animate. Design the shape(s) you want for your brush, right-click, and select Create Paint Brush. Make it either an Art Brush or a Pattern Brush. Choose a tool that can enable the Brush Library button in the Properties panel. The Manage Paint Brushes button will become enabled, too. Click it to open the Manage Document Paint Brushes dialog, select the brush you want to save, and click Save To Brush Library. Animate adds it to the Brush Library under My Brushes and the name of the FLA from which it was saved. Your brush will be displayed with a preview of its style.

   
5. Whatever tool you choose to apply your vector art brush and whichever brush you apply, consider using Expand to Fill. It converts your editable stroke to a fill, which can no longer be changed through the style drop-down menu, but you’ll see a noticeable improvement in performance.
   

360° Rotatable Canvas

The drawing tools in Animate make it a go-to app for artists, especially those who use it for hand-drawing with a Wacom tablet. One adjustment that was previously needed when going from a traditional drawing medium to digital was a way to rotate the canvas to compensate for the angle of the artist’s hand. Now Animate CC offers a 360° rotatable canvas.

1. Click the Rotation Tool H which is grouped with the Hand Tool H in Tools.
   
2. A large ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About Using This Book: A Cheat Sheet for You
• Introduction
• 1 What’s New in Animate CC
• 2 Design Styles
• 3 Transformation and Distortion
• 5 Motion Techniques
• 6 Character Animation
• 7 Animation Examples
• 8 Working with Sound
• 9 Output Options
• 10 Interactivity
• Index