So I’ve been a procreate user for several years ever since the first betas and being an animator myself naturally I had to try Dreams out.

In one word, “disappointment”

The few things that I liked:

  • The lasso editing for the timeline and intuitive playback controls,
  • the drag and throw to play the layer instantly
  • Zoom management of the timeline with fingers is pretty cool
  • Video layer works great

All the bad:

  • Clunky UI, nothing like procreate, too much text everywhere, no intuitiveness, Giant icons that take up almost 1/3 or the workspace which you cannot hide BTW.
  • Hacky use of filters as track settings (If you want opacity for your track you don’t have a setting for it so you must add a filter and then set the opacity)
  • Flipbook overlay can’t be hidden, as soon as you hide it it goes back to the timeline
  • UI duplication, clicking on Close flipbook and done do the same
  • No per frame timeline settings, basically you’re left with HH,MM,SS for your project settings, (As if you were going to animate 1 Hour of animation on an ipad app)
  • No instances, everything works on frames so flipbook’s onion skin is useless if you already timed your drawing
  • No custom sizes for project presets
  • No brush editing
  • no canvas flipping
  • No lasso or selection tools or even move tools on drawing mode (all procreate should be here or at least the best of it)
  • No page frame flipping, it would be cool to see two three or even four fingers flipping between frame as if you were with real paper, curved motion (wishful thinking here).
  • And many many more…

So I would recommend to wait until it’s polished, BTW I haven’t explored the export format but it seems they use transparent PNG and JSON as their export so I see it as an interesting candidate if it’s polished to put on a professional pipeline. Until then, I’m not even going to open the app again…