My Experience with Adobe Fuse

 

According to the Adobe Blog, Adobe Fuse CC will be removed from the Creative Cloud on September 13, 2020 and it will no longer be available for download. I wish this wasn’t the case. But the truth for me is that the greater disappointment on Fuse CC is not this removal and the fact that Adobe was letting go of it. It is the fact that I believe that Adobe had so much they could do with Fuse to revolutionize animation, but refused to do so for reasons best known to them.

As an aspiring animator and hobbyist artist it was fun to discover Fuse CC. The idea that I could design high quality 3D characters and have it rigged by just uploading it into Mixamo.com was a dream come true. This was going to democratize animation at least for the masses if not for big studios and also story boarding. But now when I look at the work flow that was available with Fuse CC, this was never the plan with Adobe. I think Adobe had creating of graphic images with Fuse CC through Photoshop and creating of characters for game engines that focus more on actions and not on conversations in mind.

Fuse CC was a perfect tool for creating graphic design without using models. This was an excellent idea and a good start. Model a character, dress them up, choose their clothes, even design their clothes then use Photoshop to bring it all together was not a bad idea.

Fuse CC was also great for game engine characters. These characters only carry out actions anyway and mostly, we view them from over the shoulder most of the time.

Fuse CC was also a great tool for artist. The characters were quite good. And could act as very high quality models for artists. This feature could have even being better if Adobe had made it easy for a free form modeling of the poses of the characters designed in Fuse. This ability to pose them manually would have been another huge winner that Adobe should have considered.

But I can’t help but think of this: Fuse CC could have been the start of a revolution. Imagine being able to design a character, rig it and then maybe use the facial animation capability of Adobe Character Animator to add facial animation to any segment of the frames of the Adobe Fuse CC creation after animation is added to it by mixamo.com. But well, I guess Adobe ‘didn't think in this direction, or maybe choose not to go in this direction.

At least one consolation is that mixamo.com will still be available after Fuse CC is no longer available. And Adobe seems to be committed to mixamo.com since they have added new characters to it and it is still available.