Anima Toon :3D Voxel Character Animation Reviews

its a waste of money just get blender thats for free and way better this is just a money grab

I'm amending my review from a "maybe" to a "positive". The program is currently still early in its lifecycle, so it's missing some quality-of-life features, but the developers have replied (feb 2022) to my long list of quality-of-life requests and said that they'll fix a lot of them, and look into the feasibility of the others. So I have high hopes over the next few months that the application will go from great to amazing. I will say that communication is something the developers could improve on, to date they have taken a very long time to respond to various Steam discussions. Good points This _IS_ a good application for its target market. It's easy to use and you can create reasonable looking characters and animations quickly and easily even with basically no graphical talent. Your creations can easily be imported into any major game engine of your choice (via gltf export), or can be used just to animate something for your enjoyment. You can give it to kids and they can make something that looks impressive pretty quickly. The biggest advantage of Anima Toon over the competition (Voxedit) in my opinion is the ability to export an animation you've created for one model and import it onto another (e.g. export a sit down animation for a soldier and import it onto a firefighter), saving you lots of time in animation. The voxel edit and animation tools are intuitive and generally fun to use. The pre-defined templates include IK modelling, making it easy to get arms/legs etc where you want them just by dragging them around. The biggest downsides (note that they have said (Feb 2022) that they will fix the issues below.) * Support is minimal : I passed back lots of feedback to the team via their webpage and heard nothing back. I reposted my list of questions on the Steam discussion board and they responded a few days later. Many posts on the Steam Discussions asking about features or help have (historically) sat unanswered for long periods. * The software needs work beyond its current basic capabilities. For example -- you cannot name an animation you've created - you only see a screenshot - so it's impossible to tell if you're looking at the shooting animation or the walking animation you've created -- You can't delete animations you've created from a model. -- If you delete a whole part of a model (eg. the foot), Anima Toon no longer knows how to associate any voxels you add afterwards to the missing part. -- Animations can't be edited by values to get exact measurements (eg. if the left arm is bent at 22 degrees, you have to match that by eye if you want the right arm at 22 degrees. When you're working in 3 dimensions, getting animations exactly identical on both sides of the model is hard to do. -- You're limited to the pre-defined pre-rigged templates. This isn't a huge problem considering they've covered tall/short people, quadrupeds and a couple of others - it covers most use cases. But if you wanted to animate say a person with wings, or a filing cabinet with drawers that can animate out, then you're out of luck. -- The modelling area is not substantial. Again, good for the use cases though. -- The flood fill tool flood fills the whole model rather than either just the selected body part, or up until it meets a different colour. So yes I recommend it, grab yourself a copy! Fun to use, and great for game-dev (particularly once the above quality-of-life requests are in place)

This software is very intuitive and powerful. It's now a crucial part of my work flow. Whats here is gold.

This is actually an extremely fantastic modeler and animator. I 100% recommend this for anyone who is just getting into modeling/animation and/or people who don't want to go through the trouble of rigging a new model. I'm personally using this along with a bunch of other apps for more of a stop-motion type animation approach, and it seems to work perfectly! I do have 2 recommendations for possible future features however. 1. Maybe add a system where you can snap to specific camera angles so that any kind of animation will be in the same perspective as the others 2. Possibly add something that could allow you to make copies of a character that you're animating to be able to quickly switch to the other one and still keep the pose of the original. I was thinking about this because I wanted to save certain facial features and be able to switch to them while I'm animating

App is very cool and has in-app video documentation. It used to be an iOS only app. Works well on Linux trough Proton. Models are OK and exports are also OK. You can import them into Blender if you want (GLTF). Sadly (for Linux users) the only thing that doesn't seem to work are the aforementioned videos. If you need some inspiration, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVKkkpCpmn4 Edit: some videos work well with Proton-6.18-GE-2 but not all. Videos can also be found here: https://animatoon.org/demo.html

Do Not Buy This!!! You cannot rig your own characters; you must use the predefined character models provided. I spent several minutes modeling a character only to find out I couldn't rig it. There are no options for rigging! This product should not be labeled "Pro" if it restricts you to predefined models, treating users like children. It has great potential—easy to use and everything—but this limitation kills the vibe. It could have been an excellent tool for quick and simple game or animation prototypes. Everything would be perfect if they just allowed users to rig their own characters. Why leave out the most essential part of 3D applications for character creation? It's supposed to be a professional 3D tool, yet it lacks this fundamental feature. The term "professional" should be removed, as this tool is more suited for children or beginners. Do not buy this until they fix this problem! This is the second time I've tried purchasing it, hoping for changes, but it's still the same. I'm giving up on it. This is not a professional 3D modeling and animation program. They should remove the word "professional" because it does not justify its claim as a tool for 3D artists to use in mainstream projects. This could have been a great program for getting into animation and modeling, but they've seriously missed the mark. Why?

Personally I don't recommend this - but I have no doubt that there is some use for users starting out. The greatest strength of this software is its brilliantly easy-to-use animator. However, it only supports its own native file format, so if you want to import a file format that is not 'custom' i.e. *.scn - you will be stuck. So basically, you can only animate stuff that was created in this program. If there was a way to import generic voxel file formats used by say, Magica Voxel etc, the developers would have a winner and something that the fast growing Sandbox content creator Community could use and would be willing to purchase! As is, its limited import abilities suffocates its usability. I recommend Animatoon only if you want the most basic Voxel character creator, and are a beginner.