How to move anchor points on two objects at once?

[Joel Dizzle]

Hi all, I'm fairly new to Animate, so I don't fully understand its tools and limitations yet.  Is there a way to select and move anchor points on two or more objects at once, like you can in Illustrator?  Say for example I want to select and move all the anchor points where they converge in the middle here. How would I do that?

[DigitalDesignDude]

You can select multiple anchor points by using the "Subselection tool" while holding the "Shift" key, then position them all at once as I have demonstrated in the below video recording.

https://youtu.be/y-ufS_BwiRA?feature=shared


You can also drag out a selection with the same tool to select multiple anchor points at once rather than clicking on them one at a time to select them while holding the shift key.

[Joel Dizzle]

Thank you for going to the trouble to create and upload a video in reply!  That works well for shapes that haven't been converted into 'Drawing Objects' - is there a way to do the same thing across multiple selected 'objects'?  I'm getting the impression there's not; Google searches don't turn up any mention at all of this kind of functionality...

I think I expected Animate's path editing tools to behave like Illustrator (being able to select anchor points across different groups of shapes), but I'm thinking that might be an unrealistic expectation?

[DigitalDesignDude]

You are correct, there isn't a way to select multiple anchor points from different drawing objects. that I know of.

And yes Adobe Animate behaves differently from Adobe Illustrator in a lot of ways including the one we are discussing right now.

There are many times I wish I could do the same thing that I can do in Illustrator that I can't do in Adobe Animate when it comes to making vector art which often leads to me making all my art in Illustrator and importing it into Animate. It is a workaround, but is certainly not the most convenient process as there are some incompatible effects that don't work in Adobe Animate or simply get imported as a bitmap instead of editable vector art.