Hey guys!
I’ve been working really hard over the last few months to put together a training DVD for rigging in Blender. It’s part of the Blender Open Movie Workshop series, and is published by the Blender Foundation, so you will be supporting Blender with your purchase as well.
The pre-sale has now started. More info here:
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=146
Here’s a silly little trailer me and Ian Hubert put together for it:
And here’s a sample video from the first chapter of the DVD:
I’ve worked (and am still working) hard on this, and I’m really proud of it. I’ve put a lot of great material in here and have taken pains to make the sometimes confusing topic of rigging as easy to understand as possible. So please buy the DVD!
It goes all the way up through rigging a biped character, with a focus on using the rigs as examples to teach viewers to understand rigging and how to design their own rigs. It’s not just rote step-by-step instructions–I’ve made the DVD so that people can really come away with an understanding of rigging, so they’re not just limited to the rigs I show how to build.
Deformations are, unfortunately, not covered in any depth on this DVD. Rigging is a huge topic, so I had to focus on one aspect for this DVD, which is developing good rig controls and all the theory and practice behind that. See the e-shop link above for detailed contents of the DVD.
I plan to cover deformations in future training material. But the stuff covered in this DVD will be pre-requisite for that, and not to mention extremely important on its own (no matter how good a rig’s deformations are, if the controls aren’t good, it’s not useful to animators).