I know my text sounds like some kind of ad trying to sell the product, but believe in me that I do think this. The tight integration between drawing, animation, and coding makes everything so easy and powerful. I've been using a lot of different drawing and animation applications throughout the years and none can offer what Animate offers. I do agree that OT's workflow is different from Flash - but that has more to do with production management.Īnyway, it's good to have options, don't you think?

Of course, Animate CC completely lacks a compositor and visual effects, and a third-party application like After Effects is required to perform this job, which is not the case with either OpenToonz or Harmony Premium.Īnimate CC is not quite on the same level for animation production (anymore) when compared to OpenToonz or Harmony in my opinion.

You and I know that bitmap painting in Flash leaves something to be desired.įor a paper-based workflow Animate CC is quite unsuitable: OpenToonz, Toonz Premium (the commercial version) and Harmony offer excellent paper to vector scanning options. On top of this, the MyPaint bitmap brush engine was integrated a while ago, which means excellent bitmap painting tools as well as great vector drawing tools in one package. The community's been very busy improving OT in the past year, and the original cluttered GUI and badly thought-out workspaces have been replaced by much better ones - up to the point of replacing the old icons with more modern looking ones.Įven a horizontal timeline is now implemented for those who dislike the Xsheet (which Animate CC lacks, btw). Have you tried it lately? Many improvements, and it now comes with nice looking new themes and a quick-start dialog upon starting OT. Whether OT is 'good' or not, let's just agree to disagree. Yes, movie clip like symbols are not supported, although those are a real pain to use in an animation workflow in Animate/Flash, and often avoided because they won't play in the view. Those can be edited either in-place or separately, like Flash's graphic symbols. OpenToonz actually has nested timelines - as I said, almost identical to graphic symbols.

Toon boom harmony free alternative