A new feature inside Adobe Express lets users easily animate a static image with preset options that add wobbles, wiggles, bounces, squishes, wind, and more. The feature is called Dynamic Animation, and it’s based on years of work from Adobe Research and a close collaboration with the Express team.
“Our group at Adobe Research works on physics-based animation, which is a fancy way of saying that we take the stuff from your physics class, like Newton’s laws of motion, and figure out how to make computers do those for you,” explains Danny Kaufman, Principal Research Scientist and one of the researchers behind Dynamic Animation. “With this new feature in Express, we wanted to use our research to bring high-end animation to everybody—not just expert animators.”
Building a physics-based foundation
Before they began working on Dynamic Animation, Adobe Researchers, including Kaufman, Research Scientist Tim Langlois, and Research Scientist and Engineer Zhen Chen, built a physics engine. The process involved developing new algorithms, working out their ideas in published papers, exchanging insights with the research community, and developing an internal library that can compute the physics of how things move.
From there, the team created a simulation engine that puts static images into motion without the complexity you find in professional animation tools. For example, with traditional animation technologies, users input technical details about things like the density of an object and how it should move. But the Adobe Research team’s simulation engine handles that part of the job. The team’s work is behind the popular Character Animator tool, which lets people use their own facial expressions and movements to animate a character. Their latest vision was to create a tool that could animate all kinds of static images, and be accessible to all kinds of artists.
Teaming up with Adobe Express
With the foundation in place, Adobe Researchers created a set of physics-based animation demos to show the Adobe product teams—and the timing was perfect. The Adobe Express team wanted to add accessible animation for still images. And they were looking for just the right balance—a tool that’s easy-to-use but also flexible enough that users can create something unique.
Shortly after the teams began working together, they hit their first big challenge: figuring out how to get the physics code, which was designed to run natively on a desktop computer, to work for Adobe Express on the web. The switch meant working around limited computing resources.
“To take these technological innovations that we’ve made over the last four or five years and figure out how to make them work on the web, we almost had to start from scratch,” says Kaufman. “We had to be creative about how we built the tools to get the deformations and squishes to work well, whether a user is on an iPad or an Android phone or Chromebook. Each of these things has a different speed and a different amount of compute.”
Along the way, the Express team brought their expert artists into the mix. Researchers began showing the artists what their animation options could do, and artists would inspire them to go even further.
“They’d say, ‘This is awesome, but wouldn’t it be cooler if it could do this?’ Or they’d say, ‘That octopus should really have a bit more droop to it. Or the rocket should squash more before it stretches.’ And then we’d head back and figure out what that meant in terms of physical parameters,” says Kaufman.
Together, researchers and the Express team also worked to tailor the tool for Express users, especially novices and professional artists who aren’t trained in animation. As Langlois explains: “Number one, a lot of Express users don’t have a ton of time, so it’s very different from developing tools for After Effects or Photoshop where users want to see a million controls. For Express, we wanted to simplify the controls and leave a lot behind the scenes.”
Chen, who began working on the technology behind Dynamic Animation as an Adobe Research intern and joined the team full time last year to continue his work, was thrilled with the teamwork that brought the Dynamic Animation to life. “The whole collaboration was a really wonderful journey,” he says. “There are amazing engineers on the Express side, and we got instant feedback from the artists, which helped us to really understand the kind of motion that artists want.”
Putting Dynamic Animation into the hands of Express users
Dynamic Animation gives users preset options for types of movement, and simple controls to tweak them. “With our presets, we can take an image of an octopus or a penguin or a rocket ship or whatever the artist is giving us and automatically equip it with physical properties that give them this nice physics where it squashes and stretches enough, wobbles enough, and moves in the right kind of directions,” Kaufman explains.
It’s only been a few months since the feature launched inside Adobe Express, but the team is already seeing a high export rate, so they know that people are eager to share their animations on social media and elsewhere. “What we’ve accomplished together is unlocking the power of real-world forces—gravity, momentum, elasticity—and making them effortlessly simple for users to harness,” says Zoltan Horvath, Senior Computer Scientist and Lead Engineer for Adobe Express.
Watching creators’ eyes light up when they see real physics flowing through their work, bringing it to life in ways that amaze and mesmerize everyone who experiences it… that’s the Adobe magic we’re here to create.
Zoltan Horvath, Senior Computer Scientist and Lead Engineer for Adobe Express
Looking ahead, the team plans to continue adding new preset options every few weeks, and to keep tracking feedback. For now, they’re delighted to see people using the new feature in unexpected ways.
“Users are taking things like wobble and putting in additional shapes and designs, or they’re hacking the physical parameters in ways that we may not have thought of,” says Kaufman. “With animation tools, we want people to get something amazing right away, and we want them to have a sense of ownership, to be able to customize and get something they want that’s different from what anyone else has. I think that’s something we’ve delivered.”
Wondering what else is happening inside Adobe Research? Check out our latest news here.
