Review by Serene Night

I enjoy and love animation, so I was excited for the opportunity to test out Anime Debut 8. All I can say is that I found the software disappointing and needlessly complex. I held off writing the review to test it out and go through the tutorial, but wow… I mean they expect youngsters who love Anime to do all this just to animate a character?nnFirst, the install. It went on my pc great. I’m running a Win 7 laptop 64 Bit. The install was smooth. The software nags you to register which I did. After install, it takes you to a main screen with a generic superhero character. From there on- the program devolves into a needless level of complexity.

I think its pretty incomprehensible that the developers decided to use Adobe Illustrator style toolset to create cartoon characters. The Bezier curve looks great when you are making realistic quality of art work for post print production but if you want to animate and draw a giant eye? Kind of overkill. Plus it is difficult and annoying to draw using points. I think just the toolset alone will deter youngsters from wanting to use this program.

Second the tutorial. I downloaded it, and spent quite a bit of time with it. For such a large amount of work- the results of this program are amateurish and silly. I had to flip pages back and forth, to locate toolbars mentioned in the tutorial. It is also pretty shamelessly brief. The end result? Something that looks like a child drew it.

Like the poser product, the software ships with some pre made characters. The creators want you to buy additional characters at cost from the online store.

I think if you are a graphic designer with a lot of experience, you might find this software useful, although I’m not sure for what- the end result looks kind of silly. All but the most harcorde nerd teens and youngsters will find this software to hard to use.

Verdict:nn* Clunky interfacen* Designed for graphic designersn* Not newbie friendlyn* Poorly documentedn* Amateurish resultsn* Set up so that users download more content from online store.n* Difficult to design your own stuff.n* Could’ve been so much better!