See 5 courses for beginners that will teach you how to rig and/or animate humans, characters, and creatures in Maya, 3ds Max, Unity, and Modo.
In case you missed it
Check out more online courses
Maya 2019 Fundamentals: Rigging and Animation
About the course: In this course, Mark Masters will introduce you to Maya 2019 tools for rigging and animation and teach you the basics of the process. Throughout the course, you'll follow all the steps working with the drone model used as an example: set up the primary rig, upgrade it, block out animation, and polish to achieve the final look. Note, that the tutorial is designed to provide you with foundation only, To upgrade existing skills, you might want to look for a more advanced class.
About the author: Mark is an experienced animator who's been teaching Animation and Rigging at Pluralsight since 2015. Besides teaching, he worked on various VR projects for Vive, Rift, and GearVR, animated kid's show "Floogals", and Spyro Reignited Trilogy: Year of the Dragon. At the moment, he's working at Steamroller Studios full-time.
3ds Max Rigging Fundamentals
About the course: Here's another beginner course for rigging should you like 3ds Max more. If you're planning to work in the video game industry as a character artist, rigging skills might be required from you in order to prepare your models for animation. To ease the learning curve, Stewart Jones will show you how to create a production-ready character rig and provide you with the basic knowledge needed. Again, you'll prepare a sample model for rigging, set up the skeleton and rigging components, attach geometry, and polish the result.
About the author: Stewart is a creative professional who has worked on numerous projects for print, education, video games, TV broadcast, commercials, and feature films. At the moment, he moved to screenwriting and directing for films.
Creating a Walk Cycle in MODO
About the course: To learn the human body mechanics of a walk cycle specifically, see this course from Kurt Jones. You'll start by breaking the walk cycle into small bits, see how to set up the positions and connect them, learn what details to add for believable movements and complete the cycle seamlessly. Everything will be done in Modo, so you'll additionally get a chance to learn its powerful graph editor used for adjustments.
About the author: With an extensive background in illustration, Kurt works as an instructor at Plurlasight teaching artists how to work in Photoshop, Toon Boom, and Modo both in 2D and 3D.
Unity Animation Fundamentals
About the course: And back to fundamental knowledge! If you gravitate towards Unity 3D and would like to figure out its animator component, this course is a good point to start from. In it, Joshua Kinney explains the basic details of animation in Unity, animator component setup, and three elementary animations: idle, jump, run. The course is focused on introducing you to Unity's animator so that you could experiment with it further and feel comfortable with it.
About the author: Besides being a passionate game artist, Joshua is also known for his excellent training skills when it comes to teaching people game engines. He's been working with Pluralsight since 2011, developing curricula for Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Cry Engine, and other software. At the moment, he's also a Master Trainer at Unity Technologies, responsible for workshops.
Creature Rigging for Games
About the course: After getting familiar with basic knowledge of rigging bipedal characters, it might be useful to learn how to handle non-human creatures. Fantasy characters that don't exist in real life pose a certain challenge because you simply won't be able to find true-to-life references, that's why it's crucial to know how fundamental knowledge of anatomy and rigging can be applied to your vivid ideas. In this course, Jeremy Ernst will talk about the unique constraints of the process, teach you how to rig under them, test poses in Unity, and more.
About the author: Jeremy Ernst is a Principal Technical Artist at Riot Games and a former Lead Technical Animator at Epic Games. Over the year, he worked on hundreds of character and creature rigs, as well as character deformations, cloth simulations, and more.
Keep reading
You may find this article interesting