As a loyal and long-time user of the original Procreate app (I bought my iPad basically exclusively to use it), and someone who's been interested in animation for a long time but too intimidated by the software to ever really get into making it myself, I'm extremely excited about this. If they can bring even a fraction of the usability and user-friendliness Procreate has to Procreate Dreams, I could easily see myself sinking many, many hours into it.
As soon as this was announced I instantly sent it to all my artist and animator friends, I think this is going to be a wildly popular app.
I bought my iPad Air for the same reason haha! If Dreams turns out to be as good as I'm hoping it will be, I may even end up upgrading to an M2 iPad Pro — though I'd have to really get obsessed with Dreams first for that to happen :P
I can't think of a better iPad app. Watching people really use it is magical. The same can be said for Sharpr3D (that is a subscription while procreate is a one time payment)
Hey procreate fans, I need your help. I have a broken iPad for an artist friend of mine. The screen’s busted, but it turns on. It’s under Apple Care plus. But I hesitate to use it, because they’ll replace the iPad, and procreate has made the horrible decision not to sync any of the art to iCloud, so my friend will lose all their artwork.
Is our best option to pay for a screen replacement? It’ll be hundreds of dollars, but that’s preferable to losing their procreate catalog.
I already lost some art of theirs when they were playing around on my iPad, which I was bummed about, so I’m not eager to repeat that experience.
EDIT: sorry, I should’ve posted this as a top level comment. I didn’t mean to intrude. I was just trying to salvage a year or so of work. Thank you everyone for your wonderful ideas.
You may be able to visit an Apple Authorized Service center (like some BestBuys) and ask if they're able to replace the screen without wiping the device. May will accept Apple Care as well.
Similar to the other commenter’s suggestion, you might want to do a local backup of the iPad that’s encrypted (iirc encrypted backups include more data). Hopefully the procreate artwork will be saved in that backup. However, you need to unlock the iPad first to do that I think. Even though the screen is busted, you can turn on voiceover using Siri and unlock the iPad using that potentially. Although, this requires that the screen is still able to detect touch input despite being broken / unable to display anything. Even if you don’t think it can detect touch input it’s still probably worth a shot just in case it can
If it is a USB iPad, you can plug it into an external display. USB-C to USB-C monitor, or get a USB-C to HDMI or DVI adapter. You can also use a USB or Bluetooth mouse if the digitizer is broken.
Plug it into a USB-C dock and plug a USB mouse in. You can tap the lock screen code in that way, or you can type with a USB keyboard.
Note: iPads only support USB-C displays that operate in "DisplayPort over USBC" mode, not "HDMI over USBC" mode (which requires more active circuitry), so only some USBC monitors will work. If you're worried, I suggest grabbing a DisplayPort-to-USBC dongle and plug it into the iPad that way.
One of the features discussed in the keynote for this new app's announcement is that they are adding iCloud syncing as an option, and that all relevant new features coming to Procreate Dreams will also be added to Procreate. To me that sounds like there's a good chance they'll add iCloud sync to Procreate soon!
I think you can see the last backed-up day (but not list of apps for other devices) somewhere on iCloud.com or in settings on some other iPhone/iPad on their account. Alternatively, you could try restoring to a new/temporary old iPad.
The external monitor + keyboard suggestions in sibling comments could be combined with this advice (or other backup procedures in the article I linked), assuming backup is disabled.
I somehow experienced data loss with procreate at one point, but maybe it was some weird accident. You’re right that procreate seems to advertise iCloud sync. All I know is it didn’t work when I needed it most, so I was leery of just blindly trusting it when the data is currently sitting on my table.
It is really the combination of ipad, pen and procreate where the magic is born. Of cource the app is very well executed an thoughtful. I wish i had more time and energy for drawing and painting.
Nice, are you an illustrator or animator? I'm a writer/director producing short animated videos, do you have a portafolio or something I can watch from you? I would love to collaborate.
PD. I don't know if this type of comment is allowed, but since is difficult to find animators it is worth it.
$20 one time purchase, I think I'll be getting this at release. I understand the subscription model but for things like this that I will probably play with for a bit then possibly not come back to for a few months I don't want to have to feel like I'm getting utility from my subscription, I just have it, whenever I want.
I'll buy it even though I have no use for it just because I want to support the company.
For me, Procreate is a killer app. It's the reason I bought my iPad. IMHO, the $450 or so that it costs to get an iPad + Pencil + Procreate is well worth it.
I don't understand how they can make something as good as Procreate and sell it for $15.
> I don't understand how they can make something as good as Procreate and sell it for $15.
At $15, just about every Apple Pencil owner buys it. The one app basically justifies the existence of the Pencil. If it was a subscription, it'd have vastly fewer users. And Pencil sales would probably be a fair bit lower, too.
As a (mostly) former illustrator, I bought Procreate once and made thousands of dollars with it. My Adobe subscription, conversely, felt like little more than a tax on being in a creative field.
So true. What sucks is you have to pay the Adobe tax even if you 100% move your workflow away from Adobe, because inevitably someone is going to send you an .AI file or .PSD.
> I don't understand how they can make something as good as Procreate and sell it for $15.
Because they knew it was that good. They also had first mover advantage. They probably said, "Well, if even 1% of everyone with an iPad buys our app…" and actually knew that would happen. They rock.
I imagine the animation features in the exist app will wither relative to Dreams. They’re fairly limited in the existing app, so IMO separating them out and focusing development there is probably for the better.
On first view of the website, I read that as November '22, so I thought I was late to the party. After reading your "at release" I see it is Nov 22, (assuming 2023) at this point.
Okay thank you, that took me some time to understand, even after reading your comment I thought they typoed the date, but I'm not used to the American date format.
With Procreate having been the longest-running one-off purchase app on the App Store that I know of (I literally bought my copy in 2010) I was on the edge of my seat to see whether they were going to finally follow the subscription trend for Dreams.
Even though I haven’t had a particular urge to get back into animation again, I think I’m going to have to buy this just to support this business and as a thank-you for 13 years of free updates to Procreate. And to do a little flipbooking for fun.
I’m a long time Procreate user and am shocked at the value I get out of it for the price. It’s definitely a killer app on the iPad and was the main reason why I picked up the Pencil.
Not to go off on too much of a tangent but thinking about animation on my iPad I was suddenly reminded of one of my favorite “toys” (tools?) from my childhood, The Etcha Sketch Animator:
The founder (James Cuda) was on a podcast in 2020 and as of that time, he and his wife were the only investors in the company. That year they had $30 million in revenue and 43 employees.
I’m guessing any screw tightening will come when Adobe (just a guess) eventually buys it for a lot of money and the company has to raise prices and move to a subscription model to service the debt.
I want to point out that there is an excellent existing iPad app from a small developer called Callipeg, that has most of the same feature set described here (maybe everything except the effects features)
I've had a great experience animating in Callipeg with both cell animation and transform animation.
It is true though that Procreate is the gold standard for drawing apps, and the drawing functionality in Callipeg isn't as polished- So I will be tempted to switch to this new app for animation, if they can match the drawing experience from the core Procreate product.
Even if this app is problematic from a cross-platform or usability standpoint, the fact that people are making real investments in re-thinking our design tools for different contexts is very exciting. I can't wait until we get some better audio, video, drawing, and animation apps built with mobile in mind from the ground-up that AREN'T indie silos of interactive design and file formats. I know people will be itchy to give me some recommendations here, but I'm cynical about it because everything I've seen, so far, is "neat but not for team/studio production" for some reason or another. So it's nice to see something that is absolutely certain about how these things actually get used in the industries, and is willing to strike a new path, while focusing on what is required for industry interoperability.
Once other people start picking up on this idea, we might get some really awesome new ways for people without specific domain knowledge to be as creative in their output as they are in their own heads. That will be pretty awesome, I think!
I mean "if this app comes out and has limitations on either your OS (desktop or mobile), your method of file replication (iCloud integration can be done even if you're using an agnostic file type but it could, alternatively, be tightly-coupled), your third-party hardware (any stylus should work), or any other area of application and binary development that would be detrimental to user freedom"
Basically - even if all those things are locked down, instead of open like they SHOULD* be, it's still a net positive.
*that's my editorializing; all apps SHOULD be web apps (or at least delivered without installation), unless there's some reason you simply can't get the performance you need out of web assembly (often the case, today; hopefully not often true in the future).
Also people massively underestimate how great the graphics libraries provided by Apple are. The thought of doing a lot of this stuff in WebTech gives me heartburn.
Like our main compositing tool on the web - Canvas is basically Quartz, which I love for that reason but there's a _huge_ amount of power that you get from native Toolkits that have been developed in the intervening years.
I legit think a lot of Web UI fans have just never, ever done serious work in any of several half-decent-or-better native UI toolkit w/ supporting libraries. If they had, they’d riot. Such an incredible amount of wasted person-hours, both for the people doing the work and the poor folks stuck using the resulting jank-fest.
I'm actually a big fan of ImGui (via DearImGui, at least) for immediate mode stuff. I can also appreciate Qt for what it's good at.
As far as experimental stuff, I'm a very big fan of Makepad's 3D rendering context even for forms. Coming from a games background, I prefer the shader model to most other UI implementations. Especially vector based drawing; that stuff is so much harder to deal with. I'm very happy with what I can achieve in CSS, these days, but it's just a million times easier to do any of it with a some planes and a shader. Give me beziers and pixels over box models and anchors any day.
A lot of this stuff is super easy in webtech, no idea why it gives you heartburn, maybe you're just more used to the native toolkits (or Swift in general)?
Yeah, I understand this reaction, but I feel like maybe you're limiting your scope of web app to "browser ui, native-library-consuming application". What I'm actually talking about is the WASI and wasm projects and the even more general idea of a compilation and/or execution of machine code for a specific CPU/OS/environment based on contracts within the system interface and the wasm binaries.
I know there aren't a lot of public examples of any of that, right now, so it's hard to be inclusive of that kind of thing when considering 'web apps'. Maybe I'm premature in being so loose with the term. But I do think this stuff is closer than a lot of people realize.
I'm a big supporter of web apps, but even I'm skeptical you could make a cross-platform app that's as tight and physical as Procreate. Much less would I call it "problematic" that the devs decided not to (which implies they violated some kind of moral obligation)
Right on. Different strokes for different folks! I was only speaking to what I find problematic or less than optimal. My personal experience with browser pointer APIs, native pointer interfacing through libusb (a subset) via wasm, the WebGPU api's vulkan-like structure, and custom drawing solutions in wasm all lead me to believe that a drawing app could be entirely performant and responsive to input.
I don't hold anyone to any moral obligation; I just speak freely about what I find unsavory. I want applications delivered to me through a url, negotiating with my environment for permissions based on what I allow, and performing for me with native capabilities, including performance, integration, and offline functionality. Return on investment notwithstanding, it's often possible to achieve these goals with modern technology. It's not always, and there are cases where we absolutely should not prioritize these things. Outliers highlighting the example and whatnot.
But, all of that aside, I made a specific point to say that even if my apparently sky-high standards are not satisfied, the product is still great. I don't feel like I was being negative. I'm not sure why that implies a moral issue, to you, but I'm sorry for being unclear!
For what it's worth, Procreate supports every relevant file type and iPads have a file manager now, support USB-C flash drives, etc. In my experience compatibility has never been a problem with these apps.
This looks amazing. Over the last year, I’ve gone from a casual Disney/Ghibli fan, to a really deep lover of hand-drawn animation. The expressiveness and attention to detail are astounding.
I also really like really smooth and intuitive interfaces, the iPad in particular is extremely natural (albeit at the things it’s designed to do well.)
Inside I’m kind of nerding out at the combination of my two loves, I have zero artistic talent, but I will buy this immediately. Maybe I can learn to have ~some artistic talent.
I recommend buying the Animators Survival Kit and working through the exercises within. It’s what many animators use as their intro to animation and will teach you most of what you need to know of the mechanics.
From there, it’s just a matter of acting and experience
This looks phenomenal. The Savage Interactive team have such great thought about doing UX for iPad and Pencil, that they've really captured the mobile artist market.
I used to do 2D animation, and this is what so many people have been hoping Toon Boom would release instead of their half hearted approaches to tablet (not iPad strictly) interfaces in the past.
I think this will be really well received, though given the more niche skillset needed, I doubt it'll be as popular as regular ProCreate
and only $20? That's just a killer value proposition. Competing commercial apps are so much more expensive, and free apps leave a lot to desire for iPad interaction.
I know a ton of artists who bought an iPad Air or Pro just for ProCreate. I can see a lot of my animator friends doing the same now too for this.
Not for me, but my eldest picked up procreate recently and was immediately able to create all sorts of amazing things. She’s even been able to create some great animations, but this makes procreate look like a toy in that regard.
Feels a lot like ableton live with the way they’ve been able to reinject the playfulness into creating on a screen. Love it.
Yeah it's a stupidly good deal from the looks of it. It's very cool of them to resist the industry trend of trying to squeeze recurring revenue out of every product!
Quantity, presumably. Procreate itself ist eben cheaper (or at least it was when I bought it) so the model must be working for them. And I'm the perfect example why: I'm not an artist, I barely draw, but I bought Procreate. Why? Because it's a really cool tech demo for that expensive new iPad Pro and at €10 one-time it was extremely easy to justify, even if I've only played with it a bit. I imagine a lot of people fall in the same category and bought it even if they're not the typical market for digital art apps.
Super exciting, procreate is such an awesome program. Bold move of making it portrait. I bought my iPad a long time ago for procreate, best purchase I’ve done. It reawakened illustration for me. Curious what we can make with this. Although I can’t find the minimum requirements anywhere yet.
Are there good Android tables with something like the Pencil? If so, then maybe that's an opportunity for somebody because there's clearly nothing like it on Android (at least that was the case a couple of years ago).
The only problem is Procreate have set their price way too low. There's no way I'd want to start working on something as grand as Procreate and then sell it for $15.
Samsungs tablets are great and I prefer the S-pen to the Apple Pencil. Hardware isn't the bottleneck. They just don't want to. I think they have some exclusivity deal with Apple. Would explain a few things.
Infinite Painter and Hipaint(procreate clone) are really the only android alternatives to what procreate is going for.
As with anything Android, it comes down to market share and variance. I doubt there’s an exclusivity agreement.
Samsung has really great products. How many people are buying that instead of an iPad? So many of my Android using friends will have an iPad.
Google let Android on tablets languish for years and the result is they’re such a small part of the marketplace that very few app developers can justify the return on investment.
And then even from those few Android tablets, how many have a good pen outside of Samsung?
Samsung's global tablet market share is still huge even if lagging apple. 23.1 vs 35.4 as of Q1 2023.
People are buying android tablets and there are lots of downloads for the apps that do exist on Android.
"Market Share" would be a silly reason not to expand. The market is evidently there. The only valid reasons are not having the capital to expand or having too small a team. Neither of which really apply to Procreate. Even procreate don't give the market share excuse when asked. It's not a valid one.
Out of curiosity, where are you getting those numbers? I'm seeing over 40-55% for iPad in all my links, which is quite significant. I'm not talking about single quarter shipments
People are buying android tablets. I'm not arguing that. But what percent of that tablet market has a pen they can target, and has consistent hardware support for everything else like graphics APIs?
Having done mobile dev, even across Samsung devices you have high variance in Vulkan support and bugs for example. Deploying even Unreal Engine or Unity games can be a minefield of compatibility testing.
It's lots of little and big things IMHO that often make it a difficult ROI to swallow.
I bought a top-of-the-line Samsung tablet a couple years ago to give it a chance. They are not at all comparable to iPads. Android tablets are terrible.
Probably no exclusivity. But there have been cases where an app that was only on ios decided to release android version. And immediately all their Apple contacts stopped talking to them. No more featured placement on appstore.
Maybe the problem is that Android already has decent and established painting apps. Procreate would get a small part of a smaller market. Big risk for not enough reward.
Yeah, this price is frustrating from a small developer perspective. Back when prices were established, tablets weren't used for anything serious, so productivity apps were simple and cheap. Now Procreate is used for professional work and it competes with desktop apps that are much more expensive. Users still expect tablet app prices to be unrealistically low. I guess Procreate can do it because they have a huge amount of the market already. But in the long term it isn't sustainable to keep improving the same app, if everyone already bought the app.
The Samsung tablets, especially the most recent ones are great for drawing, so much so that my S8 Ultra has almost completely replaced the larger dedicated pentab I have on my desk.
The most capable drawing software on Android right now is probably Clip Studio Paint, which I think has some sort of limited exclusivity arrangement with Samsung (presuming that they paid for the port), as some android-specific features seemed to have a couple of months of Samsung exclusivity before being opened up to all devices.
Supporting one platform really, really well or two platforms decently well. Also you would always have divergence in capabilities, so you'd basically have two separate products and those predictable complaints: "but my tablet can also do xyz, if you only take advantage of this much-harder-to-use undocumented API that only works on 9% of devices using this OS".
my first thought was that it's an AI girlfriend generator and that someone took it a step further and made an app to create an entire ai family. Sim games are about to get wierd!
Found this video of Alex Kunchevsky animating a butterfly in Dreams. If this is how the process actually works, then I could see Dreams being very popular. Simple and intuitive.
Of course, I could also see edge cases where the simple & intuitive get in the way of what the artist actually wants to do. Will be interesting to see how it pans out in practice.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how is it determining how to color the inverse side of the wings of the butterfly in the animation? Did he keyframe that in and exclude it from the animation?
Or is the app using vision models to infer that he is trying to animate wings specifically and just assume the perspective needed and do the coloring on the opposite side for him?
From a technical standpoint the ladder would be very cool, but I could see how it could be troublesome for artists trying to do "real animation".
Really curious to get more info on that file format. Seems like it’s structured as a database and has internal addressing schemes and embedded caching structures to allow for partial IO. The idea of persistent history implies that it records changes as events, which is a good fit for an LSM. In any case it must be a container format, as an LSM alone would not suffice, perhaps it could be a filesystem volume disguised as a file with Apple specific tech behind it.
There's been a lack of silly solo-made animation content on the web ever since Flash went away. Wonder if this could start a new era of kids making fun things.
Australia keeps producing some of these banger softwares. Best in class. Procreate, Sublime Text. I don't know why the government feels so mismatched though.
From the title, I thought Procreate was coming out with another crappy stable diffusion-derived AI image generator. Thank god that's not the case. Very excited for this.
It’s sad to see blanket statements like this. Stable Diffusion can be an extraordinarily powerful tool for creatives.
I know two professional artists who both hated the concept of AI image generators. But since Photoshop added Generative Fill, I know both have enjoyed using it, and I’ve not heard another complaint since.
I’d bet Procreate add AI capabilities sooner or later. Once you’ve tried it in Photoshop, it’s impossible to look back.
that's true, but is quite daunting that all tech art software are implementation of AI image generation, mainly low effort implementations of existing models, is quite rare seeing big announcement in art that isn't AI copycats of features this year.
That’s exactly what the name made me think as well, and I was a little confused trying to interpret the page in light of that. This really looks like an amazing app, though.
Side note -- although it's noted by many people here -- to say that I'm very pleased to see ... some? seeming pushback against subscription-based models.
The other example that comes to mind for a very polished and well loved app is Koala (a great audio sampler/sequencer) [0], which sells for a flat $4.99.
Subscriptions have advantages of course, such as providing developers with a more sustained income vs one time purchases which necessarily mean a diminishing hourly rate when you take into account indefinite support.
That's so cheap though, you'd have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies per year to even support a few developers, in the USA anyway. The app store model is driving companies towards subscriptions and micro-transactions, because otherwise like you say users pay a low price once, and get new development and support forever for free. IMO it would be better to raise prices and charge for new versions of apps every year or so, like we used to do, but the app store and user expectations make that unfeasible.
I feel like they have neglected Procreate proper for a while now. A lot of the things they've added in the 5.x line are niche, while major features are ignored.
Organic brushes (natural media like oil and watercolor behavior, not just controls like jitter) are still MIA, for example. And several more things.
And Dreams is more of a diversion. Only a small fraction of users would be interested in animation.
But they of course know that they will get those $19.99 anyway, out of curiosity, even if most Procreate users are going to rarely or never really use Dreams.
I'm more optimistic. Procreate has gotten so many people into digital painting that avoided Photoshop. Dreams will introduce many people to animation. I'm excited about that because lots of people have ideas and talent but find animation tools too intimidating to explore.
I might get downvoted for this, but it would make sense as one-time purchases lessen the need to provide more regular updates. It becomes unaffordable to continue, so they now are forced to launch separate, new products.
I love the enthusiasm in the comments. I have no expertise, but I have some interest in animation. I’ve never heard of procreate. Can someone share a link to examples using this tool?
I wonder if there's any chance of a beta programme? I literally just wrapped principle photography on a short film that has a bunch of animated elements I'm going to have to figure out how to do for budgetary reasons. Love ProCreate and this looks like a fascinating tool. November is quite a while away!
This is huge, I've been looking for a non-subscription animation tool for ipad. Day one buy.
I only have one gripe: I wish project management in procreate was more robust. Even stacks within stacks would be an improvement. But right now my projects are a scattered mess and there's nothing I can do.
If this works as well as the promo material, then this is hella cool software. I'm not in the world of 2D animation any more, but I've sent the link to a few people I know that are that this might have flew under they're radar. Waiting to hear back responses.
I will check this out. I currently use the excellent ToonSquid, but I really like Procreate for drawing.
ToonSquid does a really cool thing where their flashy marketing video turns out to be a demo project in the app you can look at and edit. Really good for getting underway quickly.
I know there's a lot of appetite to discuss this but it isn't released yet, so the thread can only go so deep. We want to have space for discussion once the product is out, so downweighting this thread is probably best.
I was hoping their big announcement was going to be Procreate for PC, but I'm happy for all the people out there who will benefit from better accessible tools.
That one looks like an actual blog post though, not just a blind link to a website that's trying to sell some random product which is completely unrelated to news or hacking.
The link here is literally just a video advertising the pre-sale of some tablet app that isn't even coming out for a two and a half months. It's not open source, nor even available on open platforms. It has nothing to do with code, or security, or anything even mildly development related. It also isn't "news" in any sense of the word. Not even a press release saying what the app is, just a flashy ad trying to get you to pre-order some app.
Futhermore, it was the #1 link on the site when I made my post, which feels a lot like someone paid to have their advertisement pinned to the top of the site.
Well I upvoted this because I use Procreate the famous iOS drawing app often and think that it's cool that the same company is coming out with a high quality OTP app for animation. If this just isn't your cup of tea though, that's alright. But I wouldn't accuse this of being some advert pinned to the top artificially, even if this was outside my tech bubble.
There are constantly links to products posted on this site without them being anything more than the marketing site. Heck, there's Show HN which sometimes features similar content, but even more explicitly posts that serve as advertisements.
As soon as this was announced I instantly sent it to all my artist and animator friends, I think this is going to be a wildly popular app.