I thought I’d try to make the simplest Maya character rig I possibly could, with plenty of blendshapes for dialog animation. It might be a bit tricky to animate, since the geometry is two-dimensional – only 60 polygons. If that bugs you, just select all the faces and extrude it out a bit. Or smooth it. Go nuts.

Download Simple Rig Here – 80K

Will and I went to a great retrospective of Sesame Street animation this weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I wanted to share two of my favorites… they’re wonderful.

I hadn’t seen this short for at least 25 years, so nice to see it again. A real joy from Derek Lamb.

Bud Luckey is an amazing artist, currently collaborating with the folks at Pixar.

Update: Janet Perlman tells me that the animation on “I Get Mad” is from Kai Pindal.

I just moved this blog to the main address at www.frankrause.com, from www.frankrause.com/franimation – since I started keeping this blog it’s really become the main part of my website, so now it’s the homepage.