Meet Franklin!

Franklin

We're excited to get to know Franklin, a new free character rig from artella.com. Franklin is aimed at students learning animation and is offered for free download on a royalty-free license.

Franklin joins the growing ranks of free character Maya rigs available to students of animation.

To see a full list of rigs that we recommend here at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.

And to see what Franklin is capable of, watch the video below.


Artella | Free Character from Artella on Vimeo.

And to see a video walk-through of the rig, watch the video below:

Artella | Franklin video walkthrough from Artella on Vimeo.

Where is Franklin's eye direction control?
To find Franklin's eye direction control, click on the main head control, then in the Channel Box there is an option to turn on the eye direction controller. See image below.

Eye direction control on Franklin. Look under the head control, then search for Eye CNTRL On in the Channel Box. 

Playback speed
Franklin has low playback speed in your Viewport when you are pressing play. To speed him up, and make animating with him less painful, select the rig in the Outliner and press 1 on your keyboard for low poly mode. This will un-smooth the mesh, and you will get much faster playback.

Artella
It's also worth checking out artella.com. They describe themselves as a place to "partner with the world and bring animated projects to life", and as a "collaboration platform for making animated films, video games and virtual reality content."

So, a potential source of talent to put together a short film project. What a great idea!

To find out more about Animation Apprentice, click here for a link to Frequently Asked Questions. To sign up for our next classroom at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.