Review for Anime Studio 10 Pro
I have only started to play around with Anime Studio 10 Pro, but I am already impressed with it.
Anime Studio 10 is to 2D drawing what an application like Carrara , Lightwave or 3DS Max is to 3D modeling. It is a complete 2D drawing and animation suite. It is meant primarily for animation, but it is possible to save individual images or frames in Anime.. If you want to do still drawings and not do any animation, you might want an application like Adobe Illustrator.
In fact, Anime Studio quite reminds me of Adobe Illustrator and many elements of Anime are quite similar to Adobe Illustrator, so anyone familiar with Illustrator will find Anime easy to learn and to work with. Some of the tools don't work quite the same way as in Illustrator, but with practice, you can get it to do what you want. And if that were not enough, you can actually create an object or project in Illustrator and import it into Anime Studio, so long as it is in Illustrator 8 or earlier version. If you have a later version of Illustrator than Illustrator 8, when you save the file that you intend to import into Anime, you can first save the file in its native format, whatever later version you do have, but then save a copy compatible with Illustrator 8 or earlier version. There is a pull down menu in the save window which will allow you to save Illustrator projects to earlier versions for applications that require or support earlier versions of Illustrator. For all those who love Illustrator, you can have your cake and eat it too. So if you have a 2D character you created in Illustrator or something else in Illustrator that you always wanted to animate and put into motion, then Anime Studio is for you.
Anime studio can also import other formats too. You can import Photoshop projects, and a variety of other types of image files. Preferred format is .png files, but you can import, .bmp, .jpg, and a few other image formats.
Like Adobe Illustrator, Anime is basically a vector based drawing application. Vector drawing is far easier and smoother to work with for animation, rather than using pixel based images. Amime supports pixel based images, and can even animate them, but the results may not be as crisp and professional looking as with vector based artwork.
Like Illustrator, Amine supports layers, where you can build elements one piece at a time and layer them together one on top the other. Also like Illustrator, you have a wide range of effects, different types of methods of filling and shading, you have a variety of stroke brushes to simulate a variety of different drawing styles from crayon, to water colors, to pen. You can fill shapes in the same way in Illustrator with a variety of fill types. There are ways of simulating complex textures too. You can create all kinds of effects similar to what you can create in Illustrator such as glow, blur effects, neon, and the like.
There is also a particle generator in Anime to create such things as smoke, star dust, vapor trails, and even blades of grass.
Virtually every aspect is capable of being animated from colors and fills to the shapes of curves and positions of the drawings in 2D space.
But you are not strictly limited to 2D space. You can in limited ways incorporate 3 dimensional elements into your Anime projects. For example you can move the camera in 3D space and create interesting effects of your 2D drawings. You have some limited capability to create 3D objects in Anime, and you have some limited capability with lights and shadows in 3D space in Anime. You can even import actual 3 dimensional objects into your Anime projects, in .obj format, and can with some limitations manipulate them in the Amime projects. And if you like Poser 3D characters, you can also import and work with objects from Poser in Amime. (I have reviewed various versions of Poser in this forum, if you want to know about Poser.) And there are tools, such a switch layers, that can help you simulate 3 dimensional motion in 2 dimensions.
One of the coolest tools for 2D animation is its bones tool. For any one familiar with 3D animation, especially applications like Poser, or any 3D modeler that supports character creation such as humans, animals, and other living things, bones work much the same way in 2D applications such as Anime as they do in 3D applications. Of course, you are limited to moving in 2 dimensions, but they work much the same way as in 3D applications. You can create a skeleton for use in animating a character, then attach the skeleton to the character, and then use the bones for flexing the arms and legs of a character or whatever else, much the same way as you would a 3 dimensional character. You can make adjustments to the bones for strength and influence just as in 3D character creation.
Another powerful use for bones in Amime is the creation of 2D morph targets. For those familiar with Poser or perhaps Carrara, you will know that a morph target is a change you make to an object that you can program, so that instead of laboriously recreating the same change in the object every time, you can create a dial or some other device which you can set to generate the change any time you want to make that change. For example, suppose you want to have a character when he bends his arm, he flexes his biceps. If he does this repeatedly, it can be a pain to repetitiously animate the same change over and over again. So instead, you do it once, and then you use a device (in Poser, there are morph dials for that purpose) that will record that change, and save it, and then any time you want to make that same kind of change to the figure such as to make him bulge his biceps, you can just turn the dial (or whatever the device is), and make him flex his muscles. In Anime, bones can be used as the device to do the same kind of thing.
Animation is similar to any animation software. It supports key framing, vector and motion curves, for tweaking animations. You can import sound to synch to animations. And the animation editor is pretty standard.
Renders, that is, finished animations and still images look quite crisp and professional, especially when you use large format settings.
If you don't want to create a character from scratch, there is a character wizard that you can use to create a basic character which you can then edit to suit your fancy.
Those of you who are familiar with Poser and Daz 3D will like that, as with those applications , you have a character library of preset and ready to animate characters and props, which, of course, you can modify and make to suit to your liking. And you can save any character or prop, including ones you create from scratch, to the library.
Also included are some useful scripts for Anime. And like many applications, if you have a penchant for programming, you can create your own scripts to automate certain things in Anime.
This is my overview of Anime Studio 10 Pro, I will provide updates as I learn more. But I will say that so far I am impressed with it.
Anime Studio Pro 10
3 | 40 ratings
Price:
Last update: 02-20-2025
About this item
Revolutionary Bone Rigging system takes the work out of tedious frame-by-frame animation.
Intuitive animation timeline simplifies complex animation tasks.
The Smart Bones feature will speed up your workflow.
Work with vector based art for maximum control and scalability.
Record audio, add sound effects and use automatic lip syncing to get fast results.
Intuitive animation timeline simplifies complex animation tasks.
The Smart Bones feature will speed up your workflow.
Work with vector based art for maximum control and scalability.
Record audio, add sound effects and use automatic lip syncing to get fast results.
Top reviews from the United States
Steven A. Switzer
Great animation software!
Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2014
Anonymous Artist
Nope, terrible.
Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2016Anitta Medina
bad luck
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2015Amazon Customer
The ASP10 motion graph feature looks like a promising way to accurately and quickly set up ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016alberto
Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2015
Colloquial Cunt
Honest review
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2016K G
not worth the money
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2016