Meet George. George downloaded Stewart, our free animation character rig. Read through George’s feedback on his experience with Stewart. George isn’t an Animation Mentor student, so we appreciate his honest critique, and perspective as a new user of our characters. Enjoy the review and if you haven’t downloaded your free version of Stewart, download him now.

-The Animation Mentor Crew

—

Animation is difficult.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that animation is difficult. Really difficult! Any animator will tell you that working with a good rig can make all the difference to your shot (and your sanity!). My name is George, and I’m here to highly recommend the Stewart rig from Animation Mentor.

I discovered animation during the first year of my degree course in Computer Animation Arts. It’s a generalist course where we learn about many different areas of the pipeline. Of all new disciplines I was introduced to, animation stood out to me, and I began to teach myself. I grabbed a bunch of books, scoured the web for tutorials, and began to learn.

Enter Animation Mentor.

By far and away the most impressive student animation I could find was being produced by an online school called Animation Mentor. The work was amazing! I was inspired by the quality of the animation, and also by the super appealing rigs which they used. So, I continued with my course, whilst learning animation in my spare time, and hoping that maybe one day Animation Mentor would release one of their rigs for free.

Enter Stewart.

I knew from Facebook that one rig from the new Tribes collection was going to be released for free, so naturally I was super stoked.

Stewart was every bit as good as I had imagined. His controls were intuitive and easy to use (really important for animators just starting out), and he featured some really nice extras, such as stretch and bend bow on the limbs, squash and stretch on the torso, and some really nice deformation controls for the head.

Pain-Free Body Mechanics.

In this body mechanics shot which I animated with Stewart, I found that I could give my poses appeal and character, and push them past what other rigs would have been capable of. The transition from blocking to spline was surprisingly pain free, and I’ve found this to be the case for the shot I’m currently working on as well.

In short, I cannot recommend the Stewart rig highly enough; his features, his functionality and his appeal give him a cutting edge over anything else out there.

Thank you to Animation Mentor for featuring me on their blog.

Check out my work at http://gatanim.blogspot.co.uk/. To all the animators out there reading this, work hard, and good luck!

___

Download the free character animation rig and to get access to our entire tribe of characters — apply now for Animation Basics.