Yes, it is a technical art, which is scary to a lot of people. So in this course, we'll start at the start...and go step by step.
You will learn all about bones and all the tools you will need to place them where you need them.
You will also learn about parenting, space, the armature modifier, blender key shortcuts and I will explain almost all of the bone constraints there are in Blender.
The course covers best practices and explains a few common problems and how to fix them.
You will learn about weight painting so you can bind your 3d mesh to your rig and get your run cycle animation going.
Wayne Dixon, CG Cookie
"Hey, guys! I'm the head animation instructor at CG Cookie. I have 15+ years of experience in animation, my mentors included some of the world's best animators from Dreamworks - and I love to teach Blender. I believe learning should be a fun adventure, so I make sure there's never a dull moment in my courses. If you have any questions, just ask away. Together, we can do this!"
Fundamentals of Animation in Blender
If you're a beginner looking to learn animation in Blender, this course is for you.
Animation Workflow and Body Mechanics
Take the next step forward with your animation skills. Learn invaluable workflow enhancements and take on challenging body mechanics exercises.
In this course, you'll learn the ins and outs of lip sync animation with Blender, including 3 new rigs for practice!
Get this course and 270 others by joining CG Cookie
This is a quick introduction to what we will be learning in this course, plus a quick video showing the settings I use for my version of Blender. This will help explain those few instances where you push the same button as me and Blender does something different.
Let's begin at the start and learn all about rigs/armatures, bones/controls.
In this chapter you will learn all the main concepts of rigging. Grab a pen and paper, and bring your thinking cap.
In this chapter we will look at nearly every one of the bone constraints. Although we won't be using every one in this course, it's important to at least have an understanding of what each one can do.
This chapter is all about weight painting.
You will learn all the tools and settings, the dos and don'ts plus you'll get to do some actual weight painting.
It's time to get some practical experience with these things called constraints!
Plus you will learn all about those famous Bendy Bones!
You are now at the pointy end of this course. Let's practice what we have learned and build 4 usable rigs.
-Stretchy Bendy Rig
-Laser Gun Turret (pew pew pew)
-A Crane Arm
-Bouncing Ball rig
You can do it!
Now that you've made it to the end. What's next?
I went into this course having seen rigs, but I always felt like they were this scary, intimidating dark art. Now that I've done this course, they don't feel scary at all! They actually feel quite clear and understandable. It's given me enough of a starting point focused on fundamentals that I feel like I can start to come up with ideas about how to rig whatever I want. I don't know all the de facto standards around how to rig up a character, for example, but as a challenge I threw something together... and it worked quite well, actually! And I don't feel like my knowledge is limited to any one "type" of rig, since this course is so focused on understanding the fundamentals of it. I definitely recommend this course to others who want to get started with understanding how rigs work and how to create them.
After watching several "open this...push this and do that..." kind of videos on youtube, this course is a diamond for learning the rigging fundamentals.
Wayne's way of teaching is out of this world. He explains why everything is working the way it's working and how to avoid the most common issues that can appear on the way.
I had a lot of fun following it and doing all the exercises.
Thank you!
I had a ball with this course! Diving in initially I thought I would be struggling as rigging looks complex, be assured it is very logical. Wayne explains everything so clearly and in a very deliberate sequence, a very gifted teacher!
The exercises layer on each other and cement foundations to take forward giving you several highly interactive submissions as you work through the course.
I would highly recommend this to anyone on their blender journey even to brush up some workflows. After doing this course I watched a youtuber showing how to rig a model and could see several improvements to their workflow using improved naming conventions and symmetrising.
Anyone learning Rigging using Wayne's method is building a strong foundation for themselves.
Thank you!
There is so much I could say about this course. It maintains CG Cookies amazingly high quality of tutorials, it's fun, it's charming and extremely detailed and useful.
Wayne breaks things down in a way that really establishes a clear mental model of the fundamentals and shows a huge number of examples and details that really stick well. The exercises are extremely worth doing (especially if you try to do them without the demo first), as they'll give you the much needed practise to get comfortable with the many details of rigging.
Before this course, I knew nothing about rigging, only that it was a thing that I would need to learn at some point. Now I feel a lot more comfortable with how it all fits together, and that's all because Wayne is just an amazing teacher!