Hi everybody,
Does somebody know if it is possible with Animate or Animate 2 or Animate Pro to animate bezier curves? The only bezier curves features I could find in animate just allows to edit/create or correct shapes, but not for animating. As far as I could figure out the only action in animating shapes is the transform tool allowing only to move, skew and rotate objects, and of course the morphing tool as well. But it would be wonderful to be able to animate bezier curves, like the Adobe After effect masks.
Thanks fo your help
Pascal
Every time you set a keyframe on an object, whether using the transform tool or the advanced animation tools, it creates a keyframe on a bezier curve. You can access these curves by pressing on the + sign located to the left of a layer name. When you press the + sign, it will show you a list of all the functions that are associated with that layer. If you double-click on one of these function layers, it will bring up the function editor. With the function editor, you can select points and drag out the bezier handles. You can also click and drag a point up and down, and alt-cick to drag a point left and right.
If you’re using Animate 2, check out the user guide Pages 621-626.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
I think your not asking what lilly answered.
You actuallyed want to change the shape of the curve in the animation right?
To do this you would use the morphing tool.
Exactly, I was actually meaning to be able to animate bezier curves affecting the shape itself rather the smoothness of the motion (by controlling x,y,z, angles and skews)
I played around with morphing and for sure it’s quite an amazing tool particulary with the ability to “control” the transformation in a quite advanced way. But it would be fantastic to be able to animate what we can currently do with the contour editor tool as well. Sometimes the need of deformation of a specific shape might result arduous with morphing.
I used to work with bezier curves in After effect simply by moving and reshaping shapes as masks. Quite handful!
If it doesn’t exist yet, it would surely be a great feature to ad for the next upgrade of this fantastic software.
For info I currently work on Animate but I’m thinking to get Animate Pro in a near future
Pascal
What you do for a simple shape set the first drawing. Then go to the destination frame copy the drawing and adjust the handles. Then morph between them.
If the shape is simple you might not even need to play with any settings.
But for a little more complicated shape, morphing start to become time consuming to animate comparing to a simple bezier curve move.
Ahh okay I see. I apologise for misunderstanding! So what you’d like is a bezier tool that will allow you to animate the shape, correct? Did you say this is something that is available in After Effects? I am just trying to get a more clear idea of what you have in mind so that I can submit this as a feature request.
~Lilly
Toon Boom Support
No problem, maybe I wasn’t very clear.
Yes in After Effect this exists. This topic is mainly used for masks. If you want to hide/cover a portion of a scene, you need to create a mask with a shape you can realize with bezier curves. Along the scene, the spot you want to cover might perhaps move or get bigger or smaller, so you can animate your mask changing his shape to still cover the part you need to hide.
You can apply any effect to this mask you can like smoothing the edge for instance.
I hope it makes sense.
Thanks for your support anyway. 
Pascal
Try watching the Adam Phillips tutorials on morphing on youtube.
For a simple shape like your describing it is fairly easy to morph.
Hi,
did you actually have your question resolved? I am looking for the same thing. I do After Effects and just started with Flash (watched a fantastic tutorial about character animation), and there you can do the same thing, you draw a line, and just access the bezier points and animate each separately, it is amazing, and the animation looks so much more smooth than cut-out. Of course you can draw all the frames separately in Animate so it becomes smoother, but that takes forever, I love the shape tweening in Flash…
How did you resolve this?
Cheerio
Elke
So I think that the resolution of this was a combination of the Contour Editor and the Morphing tool. If you create your first drawing, then you duplicate the drawing on a new frame, you can move the points of the curve with the Contour Editor. If you then create a morphing sequence between the two drawings, then it should do the Flash equivalent of a shape tween.
~Lilly