Summary

This was only the first chapter, but we have already gone over a lot of content and even designed a small project! You should now have a good understanding of the history of Adobe Animate and know about its current capabilities. You will also have a conceptual understanding of all the new features that have been released since the previous major version of the software. These features include a new bone type for Warped Object rigging called Flexi bones, which allow fine, Bezier control over bone curvature, and the ability to manipulate an object’s Distortion Envelope along its outer path through Bezier controls and anchor points to refine and control the envelope distortion bounds. The new features also include the existence of a new Rig Edit mode as a dedicated workflow for editing existing rigs in isolation, and the ability to manage and edit Warped Objects from the Library panel in a workflow very similar to how symbols are edited. We also performed a quick exercise using pre-designed assets in Animate to get a hands-on feel for the software.

In the next chapter, we’ll begin to explore Animate in earnest with a look at drawing and animating custom vector shape content.