Learn more about the new character being developed by the Blender Studio.
It’s often difficult to get access to high quality character rigs outside of an animation studio.
The characters which are available to beginner animators often suffer from poor quality rigs, unappealing designs, or both.
It’s therefore exciting to hear that the Blender Studio have started work on a new production ready character called Storm.
Once complete, this character will be added to the Blender Studio library of characters, alongside the already freely available Rain and Snow characters.
What sets Storm apart from these previous characters is that this project is also being used as a testbed to improve the facial rigging workflows within Blender.
New tools are being developed, and existing ones improved, in order to support the needs of the improved facial rigging workflow.
Something which I really like about Blender is its relationship with the Blender Studio. By using Blender to create films and other projects, the experiences of the Blender Studio artists directly feed back into the development of the software.
This is something which is extremely rare to see.
With other software, when studios encounter shortcomings, in-house tools and workarounds are often developed which never make it back into the core product. This results in big studios each creating their own custom tools and solutions whilst smaller studios, or independent artists, without the same resources, are left struggling.
Since Blender is directly improved by the work of the Blender Studio, this benefits everyone from large studios to individual hobbyists.
Another benefit of the Blender Studio is that they share the workflows which they use, and the lessons learnt during the creation of their projects.
In addition to producing the new Storm character, and improving the related tools within Blender, the intention is to also create a facial rigging course which will be available to members of the Blender Studio website.
Whilst membership of the site is not free, the money directly supports the work of the Blender Studio team which, in-turn, improves the quality of the Blender software.
I’m really interested to see how the development of this character influences the future of facial rigging within Blender.
Having recently rigged my new penguin character, I can safely say that the facial setup was, by far, the most time consuming part of the process.
Anything which simplifies the setup, or provides improved control to the animator, will be extremely welcome to see.
You can learn more about the project in the Blender Studio’s Project Storm blog post.
