This Blender course and series of tutorials, are designed for the motivated learner who wants to perfect their animation skills. Before you can truly bring a character to life in a believable way, you will need to learn to control your animation.
It's recommended that you have a beginners knowledge of animation with Blender. If you're brand new, consider taking our Fundamentals of Animation course first.
Through focused lessons and exercises (12 in fact) the course fleshes out animation principles like:
My goal is for you to understand the foundation for crafting compelling animation; that everything complex is the collection of its simple parts. Like for example, how all motion can be understood in the context of a bouncing ball.
We will also introduce you to 3 brand new characters, rigged and ready for animation. And by gradually layering the simple principles of animation together in a way that’s easy to understand, you’ll learn to breathe the life that professionals breathe into their characters.
The course is also full of tips and tricks that can help speed up your workflow as well as all the gotchas I wish I had known when I first started animating.
Get this course and 252 others by joining CG Cookie
Just a heads up. As of Sept. 12, 2022 there are pieces of this course that are still aimed at Blender 2.7. This doesn't have a huge impact on the course, but there are a couple things one may have to track down.
The biggest thing one has to do with 3.0 instead of 2.X is using Object->Relations->Library Overrides instead of a proxy. There's a VonBotts 3.0(.2) file that works with the current version of Blender.
I have to say that Wayne, at least for me, has been incredibly generous giving feedback. He graded every exercise I've turned in, and his feedback was invaluable to me. There were some things that I knew were off, but having somebody state why they were off really helped make things click.
The character ball was a little difficult for me. It was important to get the feel for animating. How long something takes to squash down or arc up. The timing and spacing of things. Still, I felt a little like a reluctant five year old eating my veggies while doing it sometimes. This isn't a knock on Wayne or this course, more my own reluctance and wanting to animate something "fun".
Doing the character ball animations gave me an appreciation of acceleration curves, timing, etc. As a result of eating my veggies. . .
I was better able to deal with the VonBotts rig. I didn't have to try to tame the concepts of spacing, timing, and bezier curves while dealing with a more complicated rig than the squash/stretch, rotate, and move controls available with the character ball.
I'm still working on the last course, and I have a bit of polishing on a couple of exercises to do, but this was a great animation bootcamp!
Edit: Mostly rearranging my thoughts.