Seeing your own characters come to life through animation is a magical experience.
This course will teach you the essential 3D character rigging and animation skills you need to get started.
"Fantastic course. Highly recommended. Love that the character isn't a human, love the part with the NLA and the graph editor.
Thank you very much."
Gregory Forster
(Student Feedback - Into the Ocean: Character Animation Essentials)
In this course I shall first demonstrate how to build a 3D character rig in Blender. This rig contains all the controls which are essential to be able to successfully animate your character.
Once the rig is complete, we will go on to analyse how a fish swims, using that information to help create a simple looping animation cycle.
Finally, I will show you how to make use of that cycle as an element within a longer animation which will truly bring your character to life.
Whilst this course builds upon the previous courses in the series, it also functions as a standalone course. If you’d simply like to learn about character rigging or character animation, you are free to follow along using the provided models as a starting point.
If, however, you have already taken the earlier courses in the series, you will be able to apply everything that I demonstrate to bring your own character model to life.
By the end of this course, you will have all the skills necessary to both rig and animate simple characters of your own, giving you everything required to start bringing your characters to life.
"The attention to detail is phenomenal and the instructions couldn't be any clearer plus the explanations on every move why it's done really helps you understand the inner workings of the software.
Learnt a lot in this class!"
Avrumi Berko
(Student Feedback - Into the Ocean: Character Animation Essentials)
By the end of this course, you will have learnt:
This is a beginner level course using the free 3D software application Blender.
No prior character rigging or character animation experience is required but a familiarity of Blender’s interface would be very helpful.
If you are new to Blender, I would recommend starting out with my Blender Essentials for Animators course, which will provide a solid foundation to build on.
If you would like to rig and animate a character based upon your own design, consider taking my Character Design Essentials and Character Modelling Essentials courses first.
The Blender software application can be downloaded for free from: blender.org
Hi, I'm John!
Before building Into Animation I worked as an animator and animation director in children's television for over 15 years.
I love animation and my goal is to give you the best start possible in this exciting and rewarding craft.