Rigging and Animation course

[Mateusz]

Hi.
Could someone recommend some good course for rigging and animation in blender for begginers?
Thank you in advance.

[OzzieOzzum]

In My Humble Opinion, the best path for a newbie to Rigging is as follows.

Basics: Grant Abbitt has videos on his channels explaining the basics of Working with Blender armatures. Grant is the Grand Master Instructor for explaining such complicated topics (No pun intended). His tutorials explain Armatures, bones, Rigging Modes and FK Rigs. Lots of stuff to practice. But as he said on his tutorials, he likes to think of him as a Modeler than an Animator.

Intermediate: Humane Rigging Nathan on Blender cloud. The software used is Blender 2.79, but the techniques and explanations are still very valuable. Topics: IK Rigging, Eulers & Quaternions and rigging Cartoonish Characters. Even more stuff to practice while trying to figure out workflow differences in 2.79 to 2.8+

Intermediate: Humanoid Rigging with Rigify (YouTube channel CGDive), Weight Painting (Blender Cloud Course), CG Cookie Animation Tutorials.

Advanced: P2Design has professional rigging tutorial (PAID) for Blender 2.8+. Search Google for P2Design. But rigging and animating characters as shown in his tutorials require you to understand character creation & optimization - modeling, sculpting, retopology (which will bring you back to the Gabbit course : Orc Character

A word of Caution though. The respective instructors have a wealth of Knowledge or Skills in Rigging and are willing to teach others. The Knowledge you get from them directly is clean, uncorrupted Knowledge. It’s when they decide to delegate the Q&A to distribute that knowledge via a Hierarchy of Instructors, the Knowledge Wealth (like Wealth Distribution in Economics) gets hoarded and might not get passed down to newbie levels. This is important because when you have questions about something in the Courses, the delegates in Q&A might not give you a straight or direct answer like the Instructors intended. (This concept is called Knowledge Hoarding and is thought to be a main factor leading to Mis-information.)

[Mateusz]

Thank you for taking the time to answer so thoroughly.
I have watched Grant tuts on Youtube and took his character tutorial here. I’m pretty much ok with understanding how IK works and some bone restrictions, on the principle level at least. Getting better in topology on every new model I make. How to redirect, increase and reduce count in places.
What I’m hoping to learn is how to best layout topology for models not to get distorted to much while animating. Or posing even. I guess that’s the optimisation you are talking about
Other thing for me is use of libraries of poses and animations. Layers and all technical stuff behind animation curtain in blender. I know animation it self will come with practice. But I’m looking to save time by learning in the course what’s what. Basically controls. Which are many, and finding out all that by trial and error will be bad time investment.
Bit of research to do…
Thank you

[Gordon]

I really reccomend CD Dive’s “Rig anything with Rigify” series. It helped me a lot when rigging skeletons for my most recent animation.

Rigify is a really cool addon and is very customizable. Hope that helps.

[FedPete]

@OzzieOzzum

This is important because when you have questions about something in the Courses, the delegates in Q&A might not give you a straight or direct answer like the Instructors intended. (This concept is called Knowledge Hoarding and is thought to be a main factor leading to Mis-information.)

Correct, we all are students in these forums! Don’t expect instructors busy all day long answering questions in the “Ask” section. And some instructors don’t work anymore for GameDev.
Personally, some of the courses I did, are too old and decommissioned. And from the new ones I don’t know anything. But I do know a bit about Blender.
And of course, there are these Blender manuals, with a wealth of Knowledge.