What I’m doing:
I’ve decided to invest in a full character animation course before I dive into modelling. To be honest, I’m lacking a little confidence. My Blender knowledge has been pieced together from multiple tutors and random online tutorials, so I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up some bad habits along the way!

I’ve never gone through the complete character pipeline with any one tutor from start to finish without the use of additional resources, which means I’ve got gaps in my knowledge. Also, I’ve never set up facial rigging – a bit of a problem when your project relies on expressive facial animation!

The Course:
I’ve just bought a course on Udemy: Learn Blender 3D Character Animation in 8 Hours – Create a Short Film
https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-blender-3d-character-animation-in-8-hours-short-film/

The course promises to cover character creation, rigging without complicated manual work, facial expressions, eye blinking, lipsync animation, and lighting and rendering techniques. Basically everything I need for my ageing character project!

I’m also interested in the mention of it using AI-powered tools and smart add-ons to speed up workflow. Given that time is my biggest constraint right now (hello, multiple assessments while trying to earn a living!), anything that can make the process more efficient without sacrificing quality sounds brilliant – we’ll see!

What I’m hoping to get out of it:
– A proper, structured approach to the character pipeline
– Facial rigging knowledge (the big gap in my skills)
– Smart shortcuts using AI and add-ons
– Confidence that I’m doing things *right* rather than cobbling things together
– Hopefully, avoiding mistakes that will cost me time later

I’m honestly a little stressed about getting my characters modelled and rigged correctly first time. I’m putting myself under pressure with this project, and can’t afford to build something, only to realise it doesn’t work, and have to start again. Hopefully the structure of this course should help with that.

In my last post I showed my character turnaround sheet, which I created with the help of AI and some Photoshop retouching. So now I’ve got the reference for my late-30s character, but I haven’t started the actual modelling yet. With the help of this course first, hopefully I’ll be building the model with the right topology and structure from the start, rather than trying to fix it when I get to rigging.

It can be difficult to admit when you’re not totally confident in your own skills, but hopefully, by taking this slight step back, I should be able to strengthen my knowledge and never look back.

Next:
How the course is going.