Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

retrograde

Members
  • Posts

    1,867
  • Joined

5 Followers

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    https://www.behance.net/kevincreative

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Canada - West Coast
  • Interests
    illustration 2d and 3d

Recent Profile Visitors

4,482 profile views
  1. Thanks @A0R I looked at Apple Motion a while back as well but it seems to be a bit of a monster in terms or size and agility for what I needed and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think it uses much in the way of a vector workflow if at all (maybe that has changed?). Plus there's the cost, compared to Keyshape, unless you really need Motions built in animation presets and some of its other bells and whistles, Keyshape's price, feature set and overall footprint is a pretty strong combination.
  2. Yeah, unfortunately it isn't currently available on the iPad yet. I would love to see the light interface option on the iPad as well.
  3. Yes, for a decade now I have been using Designer for client work. Mostly for illustration.
  4. Yes it's called Keyshape. https://www.keyshapeapp.com/ and don't let the simple looking website and examples fool you into thinking it's too simple or not up to more complex animation work. It's way underrated and basically unknown. It is no After Effects but not everyone is looking for or even needs anything on that level. The team that develops it is in Finland I think and it seems that they are pretty low key about promoting it. Currently unfortunately there are only some really old tutorials on youtube on it but it does have a pretty robust help system which pretty much covers everything it can do. It's only for mac desktop, it's cheap-ish (30 bucks) and very powerful and stable and deceivingly simple to use. It has a 4.8 out of 5 on the app store. It's a vector animation tool that you can either copy and paste your vector artwork right from Designer into or if you open a file exported as an SVG from Designer it will honour the layers stack and names from your Designer file. Both preserving your vector paths, colours, transparency and drop shadows (it rasterizes these). It has a timeline, symbols, keyframes (including an auto keyframing button), pen tool, some basic shape tools, some simple interactivity options (onload, onclick, etc...) and a pretty full assortment of animatable transforms - opacity, rotation, scale, position (with motion paths), shape animations, easing interpolation presets, etc... and a pretty cool animation playback option called "stepped playback" which can give you that classic stop frame animation look. It also has an outline view mode similar to Designer for detailed path editing. I use it for my simple animation work (https://www.kevincreative.com/Animation.html) and it can output to a wide variety of formats including svg, png, lottie (with free plugin), animated gif, mpeg4, WebP, sprite sheet, etc... I even did a simple character walk cycle using it's hierarchy system that surprised the app developers as they had never seen it used in that way. Wow this comment turned into a bit of a sales pitch didn't it 🙂 but until Serif develops some kind of animation app or feature set, if they ever do, this might be what you're looking for. Attached is a quick animation of a lever slider I did in it exported as an mpeg4 file created entirely in Keyshape including the drop shadow. Screenshot of the UI below as well. Lever slider.mp4
  5. Sorry, but as simple as you are describing what you need, you're looking at having to use another app at this point. Yes a simple timeline would be so awesome for a lot of simple scenarios, as opposed to a full blown animation feature set but unfortunately there is nothing on the horizon for this at the moment.
  6. Thanks @loukash for those examples. This is an approach that I have never considered using with artboards. Looks like nesting artboards would be great for packaging work or for jobs with multiple sized components. I remember Illustrator used to be able to do page tiling on larger oversized artboards (pages) for outputting larger documents in sections with bleeds. It seems also to be a nice organizational type of workflow to keep artboards inside of other artboards like folders in the layers panel. Maybe someday I'll find a use for this in my own work. Thanks.
  7. Yeah that's kinda what I liked about them, just simple pages or in Amadine they're called sheets. 🙂 I have yet to warm up to the container workflow of Designers artboards and can't ever recall wanting to nest an artboard inside another artboard. Maybe it's the sort of work I do and I've never needed it... I can certainly see how making an artboard out of an object might be useful, but again, I've never really needed to do that. I like the workflow of how in Illustrator, Amadine and I think even VectorStyler you can have the same layer across many artboards or sheets. So for example across all of my artboards all of my linework is on one layer, all of my colour work on another layer, all shadows and highlights are on their own layers. I also usually work with a bunch of objects off of my artboards and in Designer these objects are kicked out of the artboard container and start to pile up in my layers panel as separate layers. So I usually make a scraps artboard to drag stuff to just to keep the layers panel under control. I do like the ability to have separate guides and grids per artboard, but I miss the ability to add or adjust one big horizontal guide across all art boards for lining up stuff across all artboards because of the container workflow. I do get it that many people love the way artboards currently work in Designer but after ten years of using it daily I'm not a fan of the artboards as containers workflow.
  8. Sort of related as it pertains to guides and the knife would be the ability to cut a guide or to turn any path into a guide.
  9. Yes I think in general, artboards could use a revisit or some love or polish. Including a panel or ways to arrange and or reorder, better automatic naming when drag copying or duplicating an artboard (currently it keeps the same name as the original copied artboard), the ability to toggle the use of guides or grids across all artboards, copying and pasting objects or text to all artboards in a single paste (great for labelling artboards), viewing the active artboard to fit to window when you have a file with more than 1 artboard... etc... Also somewhat related, I prefer the way Amadine and Illustrator separate artboards and layers into 2 separate panels and workflows, etc...
  10. FWIW, I use a Mac only very simple app called Keyshape for simple vector animations. It is no Aftereffects, not even close, but for simple stuff it is very capable. You can open a layered svg file exported out of Designer and it comes in really clean with effects and transparency. (I haven't tried all of the effects but I know gaussian blur works). It retains all of the layer structure and layer names. It is very lightweight and nimble (unlike AE) and outputs in a variety of formats including Lottie (with a free plugin from their github page), webp, mpeg-4, gif, png, svg, jpeg and even as a sprite sheet. There are also some simple interactivity ability features. For examples of some simple animations based on static Designer source files of mine checkout my animation page on my site. https://www.kevincreative.com/Animation.html The app can only be bought I believe at the mac app store, just search for Keyshape. There is a 14 day free trial version at https://www.keyshapeapp.com/ I would love to see Serif step into the animation ring but like someone else said here there are enough unfinished issues they have to deal with with the current lineup that adding another app into the mix will only complicate, imo. Until then apps like Keyshape might be useful...
  11. Update: Started using Amadine on the iPad. Nice and simple UI, easy to get to everything, intuitive and well thought out too. Liking the light UI as well. It doesn't have everything that Designer has but I like its larger icons and Procreate like workflow. Great for quick and simple projects. Anyone else using it?
  12. As of Jan 2024 there still doesn't seem to be a light UI option for Designer V2.3.0.2165 on the iPad. Did it get forgotten?
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.