Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Cogswell College announced that students from its digital art and animation program have released open-source 3D animatable rigs for 12 original digital characters, through the program’s in-house character project, “Avatarah.”
The first character, “Cogswell the Dragon,” is available to the general public. A few of the additional 11 characters will be exclusively for use by Cogswell College students, but the school does plan to release a number of additional character 3D rigs in the near future. Students around the world regularly seek interesting rigs to download, so that they can use them within their own portfolios as they animate original content based on these rigs.
In addition to the first character, “Cogswell the Dragon,” additional characters from Cogswell will include “Toothy” the Saber toothed tiger, “Snowy” the dog and “Thunder” the horse, “Chippy” the squirrel, “Chubby” the rabbit, “Flappy” the bird, and several others.
Jonali Bhattacharyya, assistant professor with CogswellCollege’s Digital Art and Animation program, spearheads Cogswell’s student-developed 3D animatable rigs project in concert with game industry professional Sergio Sykes. Sykes, currently with EMOTIV and formerly with Massive Black, is involved with the Cogswell program as an industry rigging artist and adjunct faculty member.
“For the past year or so, there has been a constant demand for exciting new 3D animation rigs that can be accessed online,” explained Bhattacharyya. “Our goal with project Avatarah is to have Cogswell students create an identity of their own within the rapidly exploding world of animation. Our initial 12 characters have all been designed, modeled, textured and rigged by Cogswell College students. This is a huge platform by which our students can really start to get their names out there.”
