Before there was such a thing as AnimSchool, I had a personal dream: I wanted to make very flexible, appealing, and expressive characters that people all over the world could use for free.

AnimSchool gave me the perfect excuse to fulfill that dream. I can make cool characters that many people can use, either to animate or to learn modeling and rigging–and that effort can help promote AnimSchool.

Malcolm is pretty nice. There are certainly better body rigs out there, but the face is where I put most of my love and attention. The Disney style from the 1960’s is my greatest inspiration. I strived to make the face capable of a wide range of expression – and do it with appeal.

I’m absolutely captivated by appealing characters–mostly from the classic 2D films, Warner shorts, then from character designers. I’m driven to bring characters like that to life in the medium of 3D Animation.

You can see some of the capabilities of a variant of Malcolm here:

I also put a lot of effort into keeping the rig very light, because I wanted it fast fast fast! It runs real-time on my i7 processor. So there are corners cut in lots of places, compared to a typical film rig. But if I did my job right, you won’t notice them, because the rig was carefully developed with the aesthetic result in mind. I know the kinds of poses an animator will want–because I’m an animator too.

Malcolm was made with the amazing capabilities of Softimage. The Softimage version of Malcolm was released today–and already it’s going like hotcakes (free things often do that!)

The updates to the Maya version will be completed in about a week; possibly longer. Then students and interested onlookers can check out the Maya version. (There are some restrictions on using Malcolm)

We will continue with fixes, wardrobe changes–and new characters. If you like what you see, wait ’til you see what’s coming from AnimSchool!

So enjoy this result of lots of work, and the fulfillment of a dream. And honor my dream by spreading the word about AnimSchool and our characters!

Dave Gallagher