Project Draco continues as our free technology preview from Autodesk Research that makes animation as easy as sketching. The easy-to-use interface allows you to add a rich set of subtle, continuous animation effects to your images (e.g., JPGs, PNGs, GIFs) without the complications of timeline and key-framing. Project Draco outputs to video that can be used to create an animated GIF file with tools like Camtasia Studio.

Here are some examples:

The Autodesk Research team is continuing to work with iPad users who want to participate in the project and provide feedback. They deliver the tech preview to you using Apple's TestFlight platform. The team has a limited number of TestFlight slots available, so they are accepting requests for participation.

Complete a short survey and request participation.

The team recently supplied an update. As reflected in their TestFlight email, here is what's new:

• This is another bug-fix release. Thanks to everyone who reported issues!
• Fixed a problem where generated Grow elements had an unintended horizontal offset when the Duplicate stroke was vertical and the drawn object was tall and skinny.
• The Draco app was crashing when opening particularly large scenes, especially on iOS 8. This has been fixed, but because there's currently no limit on the number of layers in a scene, it could still happen for extremely large scenes.
• Fixed a problem with Advanced Controls where the dot in the graph was not accurately tracking the Grow animation.
• Added an option to Settings for the Draco app to clear the Community cache. If you are encountering problems loading scenes from the Community, please enable this option and the cache will be cleared the next time the Draco app is opened (the option will reset automatically).
• Please continue to provide us with your feedback and report any issues in the Draco Beta forum. Thanks!

Once accepted into the project, you can provide feedback via the project forum or labs.draco@autodesk.com or report any issues in the Project Draco forum.

Animation is alive in the lab.