I've really enjoyed learning from CG Cookie so far, but one thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a lack of courses on organic rigging.
Obviously Chris Kuhn has made a lot of really good courses covering mechanical rigging, but if you were to apply for the role of a rigger for a game or a movie project, the boss might ask you something like (to paraphrase a Commodore Vic-20 commercial) "So you're good at rigging with object constraints... but what do you know about bones?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6UdEYWESmg
From what I understand, the only courses here that cover Bone Rigging are the Fundamentals of Rigging, which didn't cover bone/joint placement too much (especially relative to the topology) and the Introduction to Character Modelling, which I haven't yet seen, it's only a small fraction of the 13 hour course.
Considering the sheer complexity of rigging, would it not make sense to have more courses that cover the subject? In particular how they work with certain types of topology and geometry? Or are there already free tutorials somewhere that cover the subject extensively that I've somehow missed? Even then, I think it'd be cool to have just a bit more education on rigging here.
The Piero course here has an extensive rigging section on how Kent rigged the bird :
Welp, didn't see that. I guess I figured with short film in the title it would be another animation-focused course.
I think that the rigging course here is insufficient to say the least. For rigging I would suggest DanPro's rigging channel. I did the last two videos from start to finish and watched some others. Totally worth it. I wish I had enough time to do them all.
Thanks for the feedback! We do have a pretty in-depth rigging course on the to-do list, but it's not in production yet so I can't make any promises as to when. I'd also recommend ddanpro 's channel as he really knows his stuff and kindly helps out with rigging questions here regularly.
also if you really want to dig in, check out Nathan Vegdahl's "Humane Rigging" video course...
he is the original author of Rigify in Blender...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=humane+rigging%3A+chapter+01+video+01
Nathan Vegdahl's course is a must have if your interested in rigging.
CG master has also released an old but yet relevent tutorial about human rigging.
Piero rigging, and Piero course in his whole is one of the best tutorial I've ever taken. The rigging part is realy high level.
(... and I'm secretly working on a character full course about rigging)