Blender's Grease Pencil vs Adobe Animate
Whatever your goal is by leveraging the animation and work, you need the right tool that fits your needs and extends your creative potential.
Here we will cover two of the most dominant tools in the field of 2d animation Blender's Grease Pencil and Adobe Animate.
You probably heard of Blender, thanks to its active adoption in the 3D art industry. Since it's known to be one of the best 3D packages which is free and open-source and above all it's one of the most closely updated and developed. Aiming to widen the range of the subfield that it could be used for such as character creation, concept art, arc viz, and even 2D animation. Tony Derose from Pixar once said that Blender can do almost everything that Pixar's in-house software can do. When it comes to this specific matter Grease Pencil is the technology that lies behind creating 2d art in 3d environment. It's a unique blender composed of points, edit lines, and a stroke, allowing you to create 2d in a direct 3d viewport. It's a cross-platform tool integrated into the 3d package itself that you can run on Windows, Mac, or Linux. It has advanced features in animation, modeling, compositing, and rigging. The grease pencil doesn't only combine 2d with 3d but it has an onion-skin display mode to enhance your drawing process and a layer management system for an organized workflow.
Now let's come to Adobe. Adobe Animate is a 2d program developed by Adobe company. It operates as a raster and vector-based system and produces high-quality infographics. Animate is supported by Windows and Mac OS. It provides you with a simple UI for drawing and frame-by-frame animation docker. The software is popular among graphic designers as the go-to solution for character creation in many cases. This is why it offers advanced tools for this specific task. The potential of the software is enhanced, thanks to its high level of complementary integration with the rest of the adobe suite such as Illustrate for example. Furthermore, it gives you loads of creative freedom by allowing you to export your work in different formats such as HTML5 canvas, Webgl, SVG, and more.
The learning curve
In general and especially, when it comes to 3D art Blender's learning curve isn't as steep as other 3D packages like Maya and 3Ds Max. The software is becoming more and more accessible ever since version 2.8 is released. The UI is being improved and simplified with every new update, even though it requires time and practice to master it. It can definitely stand as a beginner-friendly tool when armed with enough motivation. The grease pencil is also a very assessable tool due to its strong ties with the basics of 2d art. Not to mention that blender is supported by a huge community of active users and talented trainers.
It follows the same pattern as the rest of the Adobe suite when it comes to Adobe Animate. It has an intuitive UI that is highly customizable to suit your needs in terms of workspace preferences. The thing that could be a bit overwhelming at first is the massive tooling and options making the learning curves steep at the early stages. However, it's still beginner-friendly and relatively easy to handle with practice in addition to the huge support from the community everywhere on the web industries
Industries that adopted the software
Both softwares are heavily used in animation, graphic design, concept art, motion graphics, VFX, and so on. Generally speaking, however, Blender as a 3d package is being adopted by many fields related to entertainment, architect, marketing, and more but when it comes to the grease pencil as a 2d tool specifically the industries that adopted it can vary from comics, storyboard, motion graphics, animated films, and movies just to name a few.
On the other hand, Adobe animate is generally picked for animate ads, embedded web elements, animated games, assets, and more. Blender comes with great 3d capabilities besides the 2d ones covered by grease pencil while Adobe animate is very limited in 3d. It's powerful when it comes to 2d. So Blender grease pencil heavily used in all industries that require 3d support.
Drawing tools
Since you'll be working in a flat two-dimensional mode the first step will be choosing the plan that would be your main canvas during the process. With the grease pencil, you can choose the location and the orientation of the workspace canvas in 3d viewport. When it comes to its composition the points are used to store all the properties of stroke such as thickness, weight, textures, UV rotation, as well as its location in space. All these points are connected with edit lines that constitute the strokes. The lines are invisible unless you are in edit mode or the wireless view. The third component is the stroke which is rendered images of points and lines, to sum up. The grease pencil is the drawing tool of Blender which allows you to draw using two modes either the edit mode or sculpt mode. They're actually pretty similar but the difference is that sculpt mode doesn't deal with individual elements. Instead of that, it deals with areas and regions.
On the other hand, Adobe animate comes with fantastic drawing tools as it's entirely dedicated to 2d art. It comes with various drawing tools such as the brush tool which you can use in a very advanced way by tweaking all the parameters, creating custom brushes, exporting them, and more. It provides you with other useful tools that will enhance the drawing process. You'll get quickly familiar with the drawing toolset if you're used to other Adobe Software like Illustrate or Photoshop. In addition to the high quality that the vector graphic support produces. The pressure sensitivity of this system will ensure awesome results. It allows you to sketch your art as well as using pre-design elements like templates.
The Animation Tools
Blender's Grease Pencil offers you impressive animation options and tools. It allows you to produce traditional animation, cut-out animation, and motion graphics. The main goal is to provide you with immersive possibilities of merging 2d and 3d pipelines, It's geared in a powerful way to do so. The workflow can either be summed up in moving the object as a whole like changing its position, size, orientation, or drawing and animating frame by frame just like the traditional process or better yet you can choose to deform objects by changing their points and so on. Grease pencil supports inherited animation since the object can be linked as parent and child in addition to the most flexible onion skin display mode. Not to mention that it has a multi-frames option so you can edit many frames at the same time.
Comparing to these tools, Animate is more straightforward and simplified when it comes to animation especially since it's based on the frame-by-frame timeline. Set in your scene, ready for motion is therefore very simple. Just select your element as layers or symbols, then add text, audio, and sounds. Finally, you can control all gestures to have your animation done.
The Rigging Tool
Starting with Grease Pencil, it has an option called weight data. You can add it to any stroke and assign weights to points so you can use the for rigging. Sometimes you may need to assign weights a single time to multiple frames which is possible with Grease Pencil.
Move into Adobe Animate, it uses inverse kinematics for rigging. In addition to that, it has the bone tool that allows you to animate interconnected parts such as the arm of a character for example, and all the connected parts will move relatively following the natural flow of the bone structure.
The Compositing Tool
When it comes to this phase Adobe Animate may require another software to perform it. Most Animate users usually export their work to Adobe After Effects for compositing purposes.
On the other hand, Grease Pencil has a compositor. When it comes to VFX it offers you stunning effects that you can find under the modifiers and like all Blender's Grease Pencil modifiers, they affect the object directly but without any destructive impact. Furthermore, you can apply many modifiers to the same object for a more unique appearance.
The Pricing
This can be an important factor to choose which software to use. Blender is free and open-source, which means that you can get it without any payment and contribute to its development.
When it comes to Adobe Animate you can get benefits for one month of the free trial before choosing to purchase it. You can pay either $32 per month or $240 per year.
Conclusion
So as a conclusion and after reviewing both of these tools the best way to choose the one that will make the best out of your animation potential is definitely trying it yourself. It will certainly push your skill set to new horizons, regardless of your objective, business upgrade, or simply for fun.
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