Bones are the building blocks of your rig. You'll learn everything from the ground up to build your knowledge and understanding
You will learn the roles of each of the bones in a rig so that complexity becomes simplified.
Learn the art of weight painting. You will master all the different techniques to get your verts to move exactly the way you need.
What good is learning if you don't get to practice it right?
Along the way you will have several exercises and projects to build yourself.
Each designed to build upon what you have learned and solidify that knowledge.
The projects start out easy and build in difficulty as your skills improve.
The final project is to build a basic character rig that you can actually animate. This rig is designed to be a simple as possible and no simpler.
But more importantly, you can take what you learn from this project and apply it directly to your own characters.
This is the ultimate goal of the course.
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Overall, this course greatly exceeded my expectations and I have no problem giving it 5 stars
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This is a thorough, well thought out course that will take you through all the basic theory, tools and workflows required for a basic rigging task.
It is a technical course, which reflects the technical discipline of the skillset. It is front loaded with a lot of presentation which quickly ramps up in complexity and can be hard to fully grasp if you have no prior practical experience or context of the UI and tools. That said Wayne does reassure you that a) you aren't expected to remember everything and b) edits the videos with illustrations to try and make these parts of the course as palatable as they can be.
Slowly small practical exercises of increasing complexity are introduced which build to the point whereby Chapter 5 consists entirely of 6 practical exercises. I came to this course knowing nothing about Rigging beyond the basic concept of how bones allow you to animate a character and have completed it with the confidence to try and rig my own character. I will undoubtedly still find it hard and may get stuck but having the confidence to try proves the value of the time and effort it takes to complete this course.
The undoubted star here however is Wayne himself. The time and commitment he provides to giving each student detailed feedback for all the exercises (there are 9 in total) is incredible and I can't praise him highly enough in this respect. This course and his feedback justifies an annual CGC subscription alone. Thanks Wayne - you're the Daddy!
I highly recommend this course. Wayne does an awesome job describing rigging in a fun, interactive style. I personally found this course to be the most engaging of all the Core series. Wayne goes above and beyond to fit entertaining, yet informative, jokes into his lessons. As such, I found myself easily recalling ideas and topics he mentioned by remembering his witty humor associated with them.
Concepts are well explained with examples provided to illustrate them. The feedback provided for the exercises submitted is detailed and very helpful (thank you Wayne!)
I was completely new to rigging and Wayne did an awesome job in making everything easy to learn and understand. I chose to do all of the exercises and submitting them, and Wayne is like perfect at pointing out the mistakes you can stumble upon, or the improvements that can be made. I'm specially grateful for the feedback on the last assignment, where he send me a video doing a review on my rig. Perfect course and thanks for being an excellent teacher Wayne.
I really appreciate the depth and detail in how the assignments are checked. Its totally worth doing them and submitting them to Wayne. He gave me a lot of feedback on not only the big issues but also the small ones.
I am really curious to know about the animator and how rigs are used. For example they use the rig and the posing system, creating poses etc.
I was completely new to Rigging before starting this challenging course. I made several mistakes during the exercises that caused me to go back and figure out where I went wrong. I learned allot.
Thanks Wayne, your teaching style was top notch!
John
There's so much I appreciate about this course! For me rigging was this complex topic with vast amounts of information to digest and it frankly felt daunting.
Wayne did an amazing job of making the journey enjoyable, manageable, organized and, most of all, understandable. Explaining each part methodically and thoroughly, while keeping momentum, in a lighthearted and entertaining way is no small feat to pull off!
Thank you so much for being such an excellent teacher!
I originally come from a different 3D program, and when I first tried to learn rigging in Blender, I honestly felt quite frustrated. Switching between Pose Mode, Edit Mode, and Object Mode was really confusing for me. I didn’t know what I was allowed to do in each mode — moving bones only in Pose Mode, adjusting bones only in Edit Mode — all this back and forth made me feel like Blender wasn't much fun and just left me overwhelmed. I started to lose the joy of learning.
That's when I realized I needed a course. And I have to say: after taking Fundamentals of Rigging in Blender with Wayne Dixon, I finally have a much clearer understanding of how everything connects. I’m incredibly thankful to Wayne for his clear and structured teaching. Now I feel like I can actually continue learning and progressing — and for the first time, things really start to make sense.
Some parts of the course move quite fast, but that's totally fine — it just means I need to revisit certain lessons and work through them step by step. And that’s exactly how learning should be.
Thank you so much, Wayne, for putting together such a great course!
The tutorials provided clear instructions. The challenge exercises were just that—challenging, which is good. I learned more from this tutorial than any other tutorial I've completed before.