Getting started with Procreate Dreams: animator Havtza shares her advice

"My first impression was that the software feels a lot like Procreate. It has a similar layout, and Procreate itself has an animation feature which I used as my primary compositing software for a while. 

"That being said, Procreate was very limited and hard to use for that purpose. Every drawing layer becomes a frame, which makes it hard to add different compositing and texture effects, as you have to make a new group for each individual cell. 

"Dreams on the other hand has the option of having different tracks, so you can have many layers for a single frame quite easily. And with the grouping features of Dreams, you can organise the different compositing layers in their own dedicated groups and tracks which is quite useful, and I was excited to try it."

"My animation process is actually quite standard as far as 2D animation goes. I draw every frame by hand, starting with a sketch, cleaning up the lines, colouring and adding lighting and compositing effects, both on the characters and backgrounds. This will usually require the use of at least two different software packages, as my go-to animation software doesn’t have any compositing features built-in, and has a pretty limited number of brushes. But it’s now possible for me to make the entire production with Dreams and Procreate!

"The basic features in Dreams allow you to make the base animation the same way you would in any other software. You can have every stage of production and detail layers on different tracks to keep things organised, as well as by grouping and renaming them.

"For the backgrounds, Dreams has all of the brushes that are available in Procreate, and you can import Procreate brushes directly into it so you can have the same speciality brushes to draw. You can also import layers from Procreate which will be added as images on different tracks, making it easy to adjust the different objects within the background."

"I made the glow and reflective lighting seen on the characters in my animation by using the group, clipping mask, and layer blending modes features. I made the light-up effect right in Dreams by using the key framing features, as opposed to using an external compositing software like I usually would. The group and key frame features also allowed me to add camera effects on a couple of different layers simultaneously directly within the software, which allowed me to test and adjust the movements quite easily."

"I think the most interesting feature is the record feature, which essentially allows you to manipulate and adjust an image or a frame in real time. I didn’t get to experiment with it all that much for this animation, since in my method every frame is hand drawn. I mostly used it for the key-framed actions such as adding the glow and some general lighting and camera movements effects.

"Another interesting feature is the ability to group groups. This lets you group different animations together, allowing for easier compositing as well as giving the option of anchoring different parts of a single animation together. For this animation, I mainly used it as an organisation tool, but in other projects I have also used it for cut out animations, animating different parts of the sequence at different frame rates, creating parallax camera moves and 3D camera effects, and more!"

"Since it’s very similar to Procreate, anyone who is familiar with that interface can start right away. There are quite a lot of features and options, so a frame-by-frame animator like myself can get a little bit lost. 

"My advice is to find an organisation system that works for you first. Unlike most software packages that I have used before, Dreams allows you to create frames of any length on any place on the track, and creates a new track whenever frames from multiple tracks are grouped together. 

"Although this allows a lot of freedom, it also made it hard for me to keep track of what was in each layer or group at the beginning, and led to multiple instances where I drew parts on the wrong tracks. Luckily it’s quite easy to fix it because of the large amount of freedom you have when moving frames around, but it’s better to keep things organised from the beginning."

"Currently a lot of the features I want are being worked on, as this is only the first version of the software. The ones I’m most looking forward to are the selection tool and the anti-aliasing and rasterising tools, as well as some planned importing and exporting options.

"Right now Dreams is good as standalone software, but it’s not quite ready to be integrated into a larger scale production. It’s pretty hard to adjust specific parts of a frame without a selection tool, and although Dreams has very good artistic brushes, for the anime style that I use with its thin lines and many details, the colouring is not quite as efficient and precise without anti-aliasing. And of course having more ways to export and import data is important in environments where not everyone has access or knowledge of using Dreams."

"I think it’s mostly going to change the way I composite my work. My lighting method has not really changed, but it’s convenient to have it available in one place. It’s useful to be able to experiment with multi-plane camera movement directly in the software, as well as have easy anchoring and key framing features. I’m especially interested in making some more experimental animation using the many texture brushes and recording features."