Adobe Animate 2024
Version 24.0.14.24 · Adobe Inc. · Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ranked #41 in the library
Frame by frame and tween based animation on a real timeline, with drawing tools built for animators and export paths that cover video, sprite sheets and interactive canvas output.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
Animate is a drawing and timeline application rather than a compositor. You draw on a stage, you put drawings on frames, and you build motion out of keyframes, tweens and symbols. That model came out of traditional cel animation and it still suits character work better than a property driven timeline does, because the unit you are working with is a drawing rather than a transform.
Symbols are what make a production scale. Any drawing can become a symbol with its own internal timeline, reused across the project as many times as you like, and edited once to update everywhere. A character rig built from nested symbols with graphic loops for mouth shapes and walk cycles is the standard approach to television and web series work, and the asset warp tool adds a bone based rig on top for anyone who prefers puppet style animation.
Output is where it stays relevant. The same file exports to video for a normal edit, to a sprite sheet with an atlas for a game engine, to an animated image sequence, and to a canvas based interactive output with code driving the timeline. The vector drawing means every one of those exports can be produced at whatever resolution the destination requires without redrawing anything.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Timeline with frames and keyframes
Frame by frame drawing, classic and motion tweens, onion skinning, and a layer parenting system for building simple rigs quickly.
Symbols and nested timelines
Reusable graphic and movie clip symbols with their own timelines, edited once and updated everywhere they appear in the project.
Vector and brush drawing tools
Pressure and tilt sensitive brushes, a paint bucket that closes gaps, variable width strokes and vector art that scales to any output size.
Asset warp and bone rigging
Apply a bone rig to vector or raster artwork and pose it, for puppet style animation alongside the traditional frame based approach.
Camera and layer depth
A virtual camera with pan, zoom and rotate keyframes, plus per layer depth for parallax without building it manually.
Multiple export targets
Video files, image sequences, sprite sheets with an atlas for game engines, animated formats for web, and interactive canvas output driven by code.
Changed in this build
Version 24.0.14.24
- Frame picker improved for graphic symbols, making lip sync assignment across a dialogue track much faster.
- Brush engine stabilisation added, producing smoother strokes on a tablet without post smoothing artefacts.
- Faster publish on projects with a large number of symbols and bitmap assets.
- Timeline scrubbing performance improved on long scenes with many layers.
- Sprite sheet export gained trim and padding controls per animation rather than per document.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Go offline before starting.
- Extract the archive to a local drive.
- Disable real time protection.
- Run setup as administrator and choose your languages.
- Let the installer finish and close it rather than launching from the last screen.
- Open the application once, set your scratch location in preferences, then restore protection.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- A pressure sensitive tablet makes a large difference here. The brush tooling is built around it.
- Legacy interactive publishing targets are deprecated in this release. Canvas and video output are the supported paths.
- Automatic updates are disabled in this build. Leave them off.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel or AMD multicore, 2 GHz or faster |
| Memory | 8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended for long scenes |
| Graphics | GPU with 2 GB VRAM and a current driver |
| Storage | 8 GB of free space plus room for exported output |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Can it export for a game engine?
- Yes, sprite sheets with a texture atlas and per animation metadata export directly.
- Does it open files from much older versions?
- Yes, with a conversion on open. Very old interactive code will need rewriting for the current output targets.
- Is it vector or raster?
- Both. The drawing tools are vector, and raster artwork can be imported, warped and animated alongside them.
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