Hi Wayne,
First, you have an excellent speaking voice and great cadence in speech, easy to follow and nice to listen to, thank you for making this very clear. I'm new to CG Cookie as my animation professor suggested it as an alternative to regular face-to-face tutors as we don't have any for animation in my college.
Question 1: You mentioned that Ken(t?) had atlas'd the objects and that this was important so that when they're combined they don't break the materials. What is atlas-ing?
Question 2: As a super newb animation student, it took me a few minutes to figure out what file you opened for the start. You might want to say, "First open the 'start rig' in Blender." and maybe mention what version(s) of Blender the rig and contents will work with.
Thank you so much,
Crystal K.
Hi Crystal,
Thanks for the kind words about my voice, I'm going to walk around pretending my voice is as awesome as Kelsey Grammer's for the rest of the day.
The Treasure Chest Rigging and animation course actually has a sister course where Kent Trammell shows you step by step how to model and texture this asset. https://cgcookie.com/course/modeling-texturing-shading-a-treasure-chest-in-blender-2-8
Both courses were made with Blender 2.80 and will work with anything above that version. There has been some UI changes since then but if you get stuck on anything you can always see if that question has been asked and answered before, or if not, you can ask about anything you don't quite understand.
Atlasing is explained in Kent's course but it has to do with how the UV's are organised so all the different parts can use the same texture rather than having 1 texture for each of the different parts.
If you are interested in actually learning character animation, I would suggest starting with the animation flow. Although I rig and animate the Treasure Chest in this course I do not explain the principles of animation. (that is what the Animation Bootcamp and other animation courses is all about)
If you are a total noob, I would suggest starting with this course:
https://cgcookie.com/course/fundamentals-of-animation-in-blender-2-8x
And then moving onto the Animation Bootcamp:
https://cgcookie.com/course/animation-bootcamp
This one was recorded in the older version of Blender so some of the buttons have changes, but the principles of animation have not changed. Also make sure you post your exercises as I give feedback to all the submissions.
Hopefully this helps.
Hi Wayne, You're welcome. Kelsey Grammer is great! Fraiser is one of my all time fav shows.
For now I'm going for rigging through animation. We're completing self projects in my animation course and I've chosen the field of rigging. I want to learn that aspect of the production line.
I will also over the course of the next seven months learn as much as possible in rigging, modeling and animation so that I can be an asset to a production line and also just have fun creating things as a hobby.
Yep, your advice is awesome and I'll definitely be using it. You are my tutor and that's fantastic. Back to the learning journey.
Hey Wayne,
That's sounds fantastic! (sorry the late reply - so many classes/projects)
I'm so excited to complete this one and then I'll move over to Kent's model because I'll be using his little island model, the treasure chest, your Melvin (my new fav creature of all time!) and Blender's Vincent to create my final/capstone for this semester. I'll definitely get the vid to you when completed so you both can see how much you helped me learn to create it!
My teacher, Tyler Horn, a professor of animation at Southeastern Community College in West Burlington, IA also showed me today how to make the ocean. So we have a few weeks for each of us to complete our final animations and I'm learning as I go.
Thanks to the whole CG Cookie Crew--especially you and Kent!
Now, since I'm using your models, would both like me to add that into the credits. This is just a school project, but I will share it on my Friends list on FB, Twitter and YouTube. I just didn't know the full protocol on that and do NOT want to step on the toes of any professionals :D ~ Crystal