Import a Photoshop file in Animate

You are now watching the first video in a series of five tutorials.

You will learn how to create an animated short commercial.

This commercial will be set up as a squirt animation, which is ideal for use on Instagram.

This Adobe Animate CC tutorial actually starts in Adobe Photoshop CC.

In here I've created a little character to promote a science museum's robots exhibition.

As you'll notice, the robot has been built up in layers.

I've even put in a group of layers that will form a mouth.

This will give the illusion that the LED lights in there are actually blinking.

Let's check the names again of the layers.

These names will show in Animate CC as well.

So it's advisable to give these layers a logical name.

Layer one needs to be Wheel in this case.

All these layers need to be imported in Animate CC as Animate layers.

So let's go to Animate CC.

From the welcome screen, you can choose from a lot of handy presets.

But for this character animation, we want to have a squared expert ratio like 1080 width and 1080 height.

We will want to link all these layers together in order to move to complete the character quite easily.

For that reason, we will leave the default ActionScript 3.0 as it is.

By selecting Create the welcome screen will disappear and the interface of Animate CC will build up.

The most important things for now in the interface are the stage and the Timeline.

We want to see our character on the stage and all the layers in the Timeline below.

Now go to File and Import to Stage... to place the Photoshop layers directly onto your stage.

This will give you a window with lots of information about your layers.

But the most important thing is that you'll need to check if the layers will be imported as Animated layers.

The group of the Mouth layers can be converted to a movie clip symbol, which will make the Mouth layers easy to animate later on.

You've now learned how to build up your character in Photoshop, and how to import those layers in a new Adobe Animate CC file.

Let's start linking those layers in the next video tutorial.