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Our 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ top 6:

To put a cherry on the cake, you will crown your animation journey off by creating animations for a deadly traps scene!

'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ is intended to be the complete guide to animating in Blender.

Stage 1: Basic Animation

This part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ will cover the basics of animation. No bones or rigs, just key frames. We will also be looking into interpolation modes and how we can use them to smooth out animations.

· Move - Rotate - Scale

· Interpolation modes

· Basic simulations

Stage 2: Swing Animation

Using the skills we learned from stage 1, we take this up a notch by creating our first rig and single bones. This is the basis of most animations. This part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ will teach you why a root bone is important.

· Swing Animation

· Simple Rig

· Root Bone

Stage 3: Wheel Turning

When working with anything that can spin, it is important to understand how frames and keys work. In this stage, we will be explaining how to create a spinning wheel. Our goal is for its movement to look realistic. The best thing about wheel animations is that this can be achieved in the shortest amount of time.

· Key Frames

· Blank Frames

· Linear Interpolation

Stage 4: Basic Weighting

In this part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’, we will be looking at how weighting works and you will learn how to add weight to bones. This is important for creating a certain level of realism. We will also be looking at when and how to use bendy bones.

· Bendy Bones

· Tree Swaying

· Weight Chart

Stage 5: Shape Keys

Shape keys are a very powerful animation tool that we have at our disposal. We can not only change the shape of objects in ways that rigs simply cannot do but we are also able to combine multiple shape keys.

· Shape Keys

· Animated Texture

· Growth Animation

Stage 6: Multiple Bones

As a 3D artist, at some point or another, you will have models that will need a lot more than just one single bone. In this part of the course, we learn how we can create animations with multiple bones working independently.

· Multiple Bones

· Combining Keyframes

· Timelines

Stage 7: Animated Fish

Realistically animating wildlife can be difficult. Luckily, we have a fair amount of Blender that can speed up your workflow and enhance the realism of an animation. Within the graph editor, we will look at modifiers and how to combine them with displacement.

· Noise Modifier

· Animated Paths

· Displacement

Stage 8: Morphing

Morphing is the process of taking one object and turning it into another over a set number of keyframes. Now, this is not as simple as clicking a button. In this part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’, we will look at how to set up this process and how to change the textures along with the object.

· Shrink Wrapping

· Morphing

· Texture Setup

Stage 9: Tank Tracks

In my opinion, tank tracks are the number one asked-for animation, coming second after character rigs. This is why it is included in the course. We will be going through how to stick our tracks to any terrain. You will finish this part with the skills to create handles and drivers to have your tank tracks move realistically.

· Drivers

· Handles

· Curve Modifier

Stage 10: Fire & Light Flicker

There will always be an abundance of models that require flames in some shape or form. This means that knowing how to animate flames is a key component of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’. You will not only learn how to create flames from scratch, but you will also learn how to animate them. Empties and displacement will be the key to creating realistic flames without the need for complex simulations.

· Texture Coordinates

· Animated Lighting

· Moving Flames

Stage 11: Moths & Light

It is the little things that can bring a scene to life. In this part of the course, we will be covering object tracking. Object tracking can be used to create moths flying around a light source. Wherever the light goes, the moths will follow, all thanks to boid brain which is an amazing Blender feature that comes with the particle setup.

· How to use empties

· Object Tracking

· Particle Boids System

Stage 12: Clouds

The main focus of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ is to create animations without the need for simulations. This means we need to find other ways of creating things like smoke. In this part of the course, we create a stylized smoke effect using Blender’s particle system. This also means that it is really easy to see results in real-time.

· Meta balls

· Velocity

· Inverse Timelines

Stage 13: Complex Chains

This part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ will involve bringing much of what we have learned so far and applying it all together. This will involve us creating a complex rig and will also introduce you to inverse Kinematics or IKs for short. We will also look at bone tracking and take the level of learning animation up a notch.

· Inverse Kinematics

· Bone Divisions

· Complex Armatures

Stage 14: Walk Cycle

Well, we left the best part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ near the end. Here, we will be focusing on character rigs and animation. This will be done over many lessons as there is a massive amount of learning to take in. Not only will you be rigging a character, but you will learn just how easy it is to make a basic walk cycle. This is a must if you intend to create your own games and characters.

· Character Rigging

· Walk Cycles

· Pole Bones

Stage 15: Camera Turntable

This is the final part of 'The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation’ before we animate a huge scene. To be honest, anyone who is thinking of getting into modelling should learn the basics of camera animation. More importantly, to show off your work, you will need a simple but effective camera turntable setup. This is what we will be learning in section 15.

· Turntables

· Smooth Motion

· Camera Controls

Stage 16: Indiana Jones Large Scene

We finally made it to the last part of the course, and you should now have the skills to animate your very own large scene. This will include rolling boulders, shaking ceilings and much more. This adventure scene with deadly traps around every corner will be a great way to put everything you have learned into practice.