Any news on the next release?

[Jon Chambers]

I understand and respect that talking about an upcoming release can be easily misunderstood.

"We're working on X" can be misunderstood to mean "There will definitely be X"

"I expect it will be ready by Y" can be misunderstood to mean "It will definitely be ready by Y"

Still, any news? I've got some character animator tasks to do, and want to know if it's worth waiting for the update before starting.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the clarification - yes, we are a pretty small team still, and while we wish we could do everything, we have to prioritize the features that we think will have the most impact and provide the best user experience.

No dates for the next release yet. In general, most of the Adobe CC products don't announce what day they're coming out, but often we see previews of what to expect beforehand. In the past this has usually happened at Adobe or third party conferences / trade shows.

My general feeling / advice is not to wait for feature X or Y - make do with what you have today, and know that every release will get a little better.

Out of curiosity, is there a specific task or feature that you're waiting on?

[Jon Chambers]

Almost all of them can be summed up as Character Animator behaving more like or integrating better with Adobe Animate. At the moment, I need After Effects to composite the two together, but it would be nice not to have to resort to such work-arounds.

If I had to pick one feature, it would be the ability to round off the timing of all visemes to the nearest whole frame, then frame by frame, be able to swap visemes out (like I would with Adobe Animate).

What would be even more awesome, is if the lipsync feature were just imported to Adobe Animate directly.
Bringing the bone tool to Character Animator would also be awesome.

Importing vector animation would be another feature I'd use, rather than only importing PNGs, so an animation could be created using shape tweens and motion tweens in Animate before being pushed over to Character Animator.

[oksamurai]

Excellent, thanks very much for the feedback.

[Jon Chambers]

Also, you know how the drag tool in illustrator snaps to the centres and edges of things? It would be nice if all the handles, staples and pivot points did likewise.