Long Winter Studios was built to solve one major problem. The limitations on animation education due to lack of quality assets and pipeline. We’ve done everything over the past 4 years with this picture in mind. That’s why we’re the leading source of characters for higher education in the world today. Our assets are used in the most advanced programs around the world. We have aided in student success by providing industry level characters and tools. This removes one of the biggest pain points in higher education for animation and replaces it with a professional, dependable and exciting solution for both students and faculty.

How Can We Improve Your Student Success?

Providing quality characters to your students is essential to building a quality animation education in our competitive industry. On the first day of school, your students show up looking to gain knowledge and tools. You don’t expect them to build pencils or erasers or a 3d animation software package in school. In the same way, if you want to teach animators in a competitive course, they will need the basic tools of the trade. After Maya, one of the most important tools you can give animators are characters to animate and a pipeline in which to manage their files. This allows them to get right into making great shots that will ultimately land them jobs.

We replace a mess of bad assets found on most school campuses with reliable, industry quality assets. In many schools, it’s normal for students and faculty alike to rely on free characters available online. Most of these characters have been built by other students and are neither maintained nor will the creator offer custom service when a student runs into trouble. That all changes with Long Winter. We provide user friendly pipeline and the ability to download 40 beautiful, high-quality assets with a single click.

Students struggle but, we help faculty by offering excellent customer service to all our users. We have industry pros ready to help whenever a person has a question about a character or their account. Not only do we answer questions in real time about issues a student may have, we also manages and update our characters. Every year, Autodesk releases a new version of  Maya. That can wreak havoc on your students and faculty as they scramble to rebuild their system within this new framework.
For example, Autodesk has released maya 2017 and many schools have already made the leap. This new update included major overhauls to both their viewport and their python implementation. As of right now, most tools and characters available online are experiencing major bugs and many are unusable. But, we’ve made the appropriate changes and modifications to our system and all Long Winter assets and tools are working smoothly in this new environment as well as with past versions of maya.

You are a unique school with specific needs. A one size fits all mentality rarely works when it comes to providing solutions in higher education. Our team is willing and able to build a custom solution for large groups. This could mean writing custom tools, help managing student licenses or coming up with a pricing model that fit’s well with your specific needs.

We haven’t even talked about our characters!  

We currently host 40 unique characters that have been built for education. Everything from design to controls setup to actual rigging, we’ve keeps animation education at the focus.

We offer beginner characters for the intro classes, intermediate characters, advanced characters as well as creatures and game assets. That means, we are a one stop shop for everything your students will need to learn animation, make short films and become excellent animators.

Pricing Solutions for Groups

Our standard pricing model works out to cost groups between $2 and $5 per student per month. We setup the accounts to be managed by a faculty member giving great flexibility and ease of access to you group. We’ve also cut down on faculty impact as the students will be able to manage their own files once they’ve been added to the master list.

We’re here to find the best way for you to offer our assets to yous students and faculty. We offer a few base pricing options to get the conversation started but often, a custom solution is needed to best fit your situation. If you would like to go over the specific options for your group, we’ve love to talk with you about them.

Email sales@longwintermembers.com for more information

Character Catalog

We’ve put together a few images of our characters. You won’t find a better looking crew than this.