Use Cases for Adobe Animate Symbols 

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1. LOOPING ANIMATIONS/Looped Symbol in Adobe Animate

In Adobe Animate you can set your symbols to loop! This is amazingly useful if you're needing a lot of little things, like swaying grass, to keep repeating over and over again. This can also be useful if you don't want to animate the end and beginning of each cycle.

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2. SINGLE FRAME PLAYBACK

What do you use if you don't want a loop? Well, if you need an animation to play and then stop when all the frames have been shown, use the Single Frame playback option. For example, if you have an explosion or dust flying away you'll only need it to play through once.

Single Frame Playback in Adobe Animate

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3. SINGLE FRAME

Need to set specific mouth movements for vowels or a closed mouth smirk? Use the Frame Picker panel as you're scrubbing through your timeline. Just choose which frame you want by clicking the representative graphic. Once clicked it will automatically create a keyframe on your layer so that your mouth state changes.

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How to make symbols in Adobe Animate

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To convert an animation to symbol in Adobe Animate simply click Modify > Convert to Symbol. Once clicked you'll have an opportunity to name your symbol and choose from various setting. For this tutorial go ahead and set it to graphic and not movie.

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When you're creating your symbols try to add them to folder of groups that pair well together. Try to use good logic when creating symbols, for example create a 'head' folder for symbols related to the head, and if you're creating elements for the arms, well... make an arms folder. This will save you a lot of trouble once you've built up several different animated symbols for your library.

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ADVANTAGES OF USING SYMBOLS

Symbols are like compositions in After Effects. Symbols are super dynamic and can save a lot of time with nuanced animations. Not only that, but you don't want to have to redraw certain assets if you can just duplicate them using Symbols. They're especially helpful if you're looking to get better at character animation.

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Why would you want to do this instead of straight ahead drawing every frame? Well, here are some benefits of using symbols in Adobe Animate:

• Easily duplicate pre-built animations

• Symbols have transform properties on pre-built animations

• Symbols can loop animations

• Symbols can create a library of poses

• Symbols can replace poses for a frame using frame picker

• Symbols can reduce the need to redraw common elements

• Symbols change the starting frame