Hi Sandy, I agree with Eric. It's really a mixed bag without having word of mouth from people you trust... I too took Raff's course and found it fantastic, but I also took a certain Maya rigging one -- not the Judd one -- only knowing his credentials were good, but it turned out quite terribly produced. :/ (I don't wanna name names.)
The teacher in this case clearly knew a lot, was a nice guy and had lots of experience, but as a teacher he'd seriously drag on and make mistakes in his very elongated videos that he would not edit out; I don't know if due to lack of time on a busy schedule, lack of editing software, or just lazyness. Either way, you'd waste half an hour doing some setup to find out in the last 3 or 4 minutes that he missed a key part and then backtracked to fix it. Sometimes like 10 minutes went by before he completely throw away the approach he was doing. If you were to skip through his two hour video, even just by minute increments, you could very easily miss a crucial backtracking moment, and then your setup didn't match his. The Rigging Dojo videos look good, though I've never taken a course there myself so who knows. That said, their teachers seem to really love their field, which is a good sign. David Gallagher's AnimSchool looks great too. In another topic, how's her vector math? You can do quite a bit of rigging without knowing any, but if you know a little bit it can help a ton to slowly master doing some nifty deformers in ICE and so on. -- Khan Academy has some good general videos on linear algebra concepts: http://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra and CMIvfx has these good ICE ones: http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/418/Softimage+ICE+Deformers http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/197/Softimage+ICE+For+A+Production+Pipeline http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/212/Softimage+ICE%3A+Scalar+Data and this one I recently heard of, not watched, but it's probably good cause Mr.Vernon makes awesome things: http://www.cgcircuit.com/lessondetailcomplete.php?val=599 Cheers, -- Alan On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 4:25 AM, Eric Thivierge <ethivie...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Its a tough call. I only took the general TD with Python in XSI with Raf. > Hopefully they'll be selling it stand alone shortly. I haven't seen any > others that are terribly appealing. Not saying they don't offer great quality > but its hard to tell without word of mouth and recommendations, basically > what you're asking for. :) > > Overall I think rigging-wise you can get a lot out of rigging courses even if > they are Maya based. It's more the concepts and approaches than actual > application. If you're going to a course to just see how to push this button > and then this one, then this one... so on and so on, you're not going to get > anything out of it. I'd try to find a bunch of different course and see if > you can email the instructor ahead of time to get an overview of the course > and ask more in depth questions about what you're hoping to learn from it. > Also ask for references that you can email / ask opinions in regards to the > course. > > I have a mixed riggng experience from XSI to Maya and back and many rigging > concepts are universal. Implementation in the application is where it varies, > not the concepts. > > I saw this one a while back, not sure about how good it is: > http://www.riggingdojo.com/ > > -------------------------------------------- > Eric Thivierge > http://www.ethivierge.com > > > > On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Sandy Sutherland > <sandy.sutherl...@triggerfish.co.za> wrote: >> >> Hi Guys, >> >> Quick question - what do you guys think would be the best Rigging or >> Character TD type course to have someone take - would be ideally an online >> type course. >> >> Currently the idea is to start with the 8 week Facial Rigging by Judd >> Simantov off cgsociety - >> http://workshops.cgsociety.org/courseinfo.php?id=275 - anyone done this >> course, it looks quite good but I am concerned it is Maya-centric? >> >> This is for one of our Riggers who is going for the lead role. >> >> Thanks for any input. >> >> S. >> >> _____________________________ >> Sandy Sutherland >> Technical Supervisor >> sandy.sutherl...@triggerfish.co.za >> _____________________________ >> >> >> >> >
