I'm looking for an up to date downloadable character course/tutorial

[Morne]

Hi all Can anybody recommend a good up to date 3ds max character modelling, rigging, texturing, animating tutorial/course that I can purchase and download?

[joconnell]

Rigging wise the best stuff is paul neales dvds from cg academy - it's an older version of max but the knowledge is top notch. Rock solid rigs from one of the best max riggers in the world.

[add101]

3d Buzz have some pretty cool tutorials on a wide variety of subjects. There are some free videos, and if you get a member sponsorship you get access to a lot of other videos.

I did the alien modelling tutorial, and I 've found the poly modelling techniques I learned very useful for furniture modelling.
I like their informal style and videos are pretty entertaining. They have some videos on motion builder, but i haven't checked them out yet.


They've recently released a whole lot of training videos on the UNITY game engine as well. link



Some of Autodesks videos also look interesting link

[Morne]

What's the difference between "manual" character rigging and animation vs doing it with something like CAT? Is it that the one is manual, and the other is sort of automated with a nicer interface?

I just want to make sure I spend my cash on the right thing

[joconnell]

Manual is literally setting up everything from scratch, making bones, assigning controllers, doing all of the parenting and scripting. Cat gives you a library of preset objects and rigs built in so it's more drag and drop. It's a bit like a more expanded character studio. The Paul Neale dvds are admittedly a longer way to make rigs but the by product is that you've got a really good understanding of how parenting and transforms work in max so it'll give you knowledge to fix other bugs in your hierarchies.