Previously, if you wanted to record a live puppet performance with the Bone tool, you couldn’t. You had to keyframe every single pose. Animate 2023 introduces Pose Recording. Click the red button, wiggle your character around with the mouse or pen, and it records every twitch, drag, and swoop as keyframes. It feels like traditional stop-motion puppetry but digital. The cleanup is a bit messy (lots of redundant frames), but for roughing out a walk cycle or a reactive character gesture, it’s pure magic.
The Feature: Pressure-Sensitive Fluid Brushes
While still officially in "Beta" status within the 2023 build, the Advanced Rigging Panel is worth mentioning because it is now bundled by default. adobe animate 2023 new features
This panel feels like Adobe looked at Toon Boom Harmony and said, "Let's do that but in Animate."
Warning: This is still buggy on complex rigs, but for simple characters (like for YouTube explainer videos), it reduces rigging time from hours to minutes. Previously, if you wanted to record a live
Previously, Warping a gradient caused ugly tearing or color banding. The 2023 engine introduced a Gradient Mesh inside the Asset Warp tool.
Historically, Adobe Animate struggled with raster images (PNGs, JPEGs). If you scaled a bitmap, you got pixelation. If you distorted it, it looked like garbage. Warning: This is still buggy on complex rigs,
Adobe Animate 2023 introduces "Wrap" mode for bitmaps.
This feature treats the raster image as if it were taffy. You can now use the Free Transform tool to bend, curve, and warp raster images using bezier handles.
While not flashy, the performance upgrades were substantial: