We are excited to announce Animation Tool Kit, a training series on character animation in Blender.
Following the Animation Fundamentals Series, we have partnered with Beorn Leonard and Nathan Vegdahl to bring you a new training series on character animation production and workflow.
What is the Animation Tool Kit?
In this Blender training series you will learn body animation, facial animation, lip syncing, and a complete workflow for animating your character scenes in Blender using our new Cookie Flex Rig. Through the series you will be walked through the complete process of animating two scenes, from story-boarding to layout to blocking to polishing the animation. One scene will be taught by Beorn, and one scene by Nathan.
You will also learn the ins and outs of the Cookie Flex Rig, how to quickly generate many character variations, and how to bring the rig into your scenes. Along with this you will learn about each of the different animation editors, working with pose libraries, keying and auto-keying in depth to build upon what you learned in the Animation Fundamentals Series.
Will open for regular orders soon.
What is the Cookie Flex Rig that is included?
Along with this series, we’ve developed a new custom rig that allows you to generate your own characters easily. This highly customizable rig allows for a wide range of variations, giving you a chance to animate almost any human character you can imagine.
The Cookie Flex Rig was created by Jonathan Williamson, Nathan Vegdahl and Beorn Leonard, based on an initial design by David Revoy. The rig is designed for maximum flexibility, with numerous controls for body shape, facial features and a small library of clothing and hairstyles. It’s intended to provide a great resource for learning and testing animation.
The rig will be resourced for free under a Creative Commons license shortly after the release of the training series to help build a continually improving set of resources for the Blender animation user-base.
Will open for regular orders soon.
Often Asked Questions:
Q: Will I be able to use the character and rig in my own projects?
a: Absolutely! We will be releasing the rig under Creative Commons and so you will be able to use it for anything you wish.
Q: What was Jonathan’s role in the series?
a: Jonathan worked with Beorn and Nathan quite a bit on this series. Jonathan’s task was to create the character mesh that would be able to adapt to all of these character types by creating very clean topology that allowed for a large range of shapes and deformations.
Q: When will this series be released?
a: The current production schedules has us around mid-November for completion
Q: How much is the final price?
a: The final training series cost will be $48 USD for the download version and $54USD for the DVD-R version.
This looks awesome!
I’ve pre-ordered and can’t wait to get my stuff.
Pre-ordered! Rigging & animation is the field where I lack knowledge the most…
Hi, I pre-ordered and got my citizen discount code but I don’t know where to put it(no I’m not put’n it there.). Because my current citizenship subscription ends in January and the discount code was only valid on new subscriptions until 1st December. Am I still eligible if I renew my current subscription(currently active but not set to renew automatically).
Can these rigs exported to Poser?
Ray
No they cannot
-Alex
Would you say that the “Animation Fundamentals Training Series” is a prerequisite for this?
Also, do citizen discounts apply to preorders only?
Nope, you can jump straight into this as they are separate. but Animation fundamentals is a great series if you want to get started into animation
And yes I believe so though can’t be sure on that.
-Alex
I would say that it is a prerequisite. We pretty much pick up where that series leaves off.
Basically we assume that you have a basic grasp of Blender’s interface and have done beginner exercises such as the bouncing ball and a basic walk cycle.
This series goes into more depth about Blender’s animation tools and introduces topics not covered in the fundamentals series, like how to do lip sync, for example.
Cool, thanks. I wanted to save time and skip the first one, but I guess I’ll have to get both. Learning more is never a bad thing. tnx
Yeees!
This is the exactly thing that I was looking for, for so long!
I’ll definitely pre-order it in this weekend!
Fially I can work out with animations for real and keep going with my project.
You might want to do it sooner than that because I think they are going to send the digital download emails out any day now. I’d hate to see you miss out on the deal.
Really?
Then I have to do it as soon as possible!
Thanks mate for putting this up!
Much appreciated!
Well it looks like you could have waited for the weekend. Sorry about that, I was just basing my response to you on the production email that was sent out.
Exactly the sort of things ive been looking for. Quick question; i live in London in the UK, will i still be able to get it? And how much will it cost in pound sterling? thanks
I cant wait for my download!! ive got a project lined up,but was struggling with the riggs!!
Done! Great!
LOL
Well that sucks, my cash flow is tight right now until mid to late dec. I hope it is still available then.
I didn’t want to buy it since I know almost nothing about animation but the price is just too tempting!
If you are a complete beginner with animation I would suggest that the Animation Fundamentals series might be a better option. Once you’ve finished with that, you will get a lot more out of this one.
Awsome ! The girl in the demo look a little bit like roxanne ritchie in megamind
Bey
What happened to the end of the week last week? Are there problems? Early last week I got a production update that said it was only days away.
It’s almost here!
The team is working around the cloth to make final tweaks and make sure everything is perfect before we release it.
-Alex
hi everybody. i am from Ivory coast and would like to pre-order de download version. but there is no option for the payment for me. How should I do??? Thanks.
Contact us at [email protected] and we will see what we can do
-Alex
It’s not fair. I cannot do it
I think I pre-ordered just in time. I saw the post about it on Facebook. I got confused and thought the expires Dec 1st was for the pre-ordering, but looks like that is for the discount code. I enjoyed the first DVD and expect this one is going to be just as great.
I’ve been going through all the videos myself and I have to say, there’s so much knowledge between Nathan and Beorn. It’s just awesome.
Greetings Jonathan, do we have an ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) on this? I thought that I read something saying maybe this week, is it soup yet?
DJS
The emails with the download links just went out! You should have an email now. If you don’t see anything within ten minutes then shoot us an email at [email protected]
I just saw the post on Facebook. Is there a way we could still take advantage of the pre-order at this point? Thanks -e
Hi there,
All Pre-orders have already been sent out and so unfortunately we can’t. Thanks for the interest, hope you understand!
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hi,
it’s for download or in DVD?
Thanks!
The digital download is available now. The DVD version will be available within a week or two soon as we get them back from the printer.
Thanks so so much CG Cookie, this is just amazing stuff, ive never been SO excited in my life! Now you can do monthly animation competitions and beorn and Nathan can critique the winner, 11 second club style:)
hi, this is brilliant…i can see this working for other styles of characters…OR even for a game situation such as SIMS i.e. when player creates there avatar…
Brilliant work ladies…
However ? and very big BUTT
i cant change the shape of the lips, can there be a version 2 were the user can also change the lip shape i.e. consistent with the rest of the customization offered to the end-user…
how do i add more variants i.e. hair, and clothing
kind regards
It is possible to add variants but it is not a straightforward process.
Perhaps this may be covered at a later stage.
- Alex