This is 52 solid weeks of character designing, modelling and animation for film, broadcast and gaming. It includes five modules and has a prerequisite of our 3D Basics program.
This program will teach you advanced techniques for designing, modelling, rigging, texturing, and animating characters, both human and anthropomorphic, in a variety of styles.
When you've finished this advanced program, you will have the skills necessary to create original characters for games and animations. You will be able to rig up a character for another animator in your company to animate; and you will also be able to enter someone else's environment and animate their character - essential elements for working in an animation team.
Pre-Requisites: 3D Animation Diploma Program
(or equivalent)
This program will teach you advanced techniques for designing, modelling, rigging, texturing, and animating characters, both human and anthropomorphic, in a variety of styles.
When you've finished this advanced program, you will have the skills necessary to create original characters for games and animations. You will be able to rig up a character for another animator in your company to animate; and you will also be able to enter someone else's environment and animate their character - essential elements for working in an animation team.
Pre-Requisites: 3D Animation Diploma Program
(or equivalent)
Duration: 52 weeks, 1040 hours (Based on a 20-hour work week)
Modeling for Animation
You will learn the processes for designing likeable characters, including personality, biographies, sketches, style decisions and animatability. Includes a review of modelling and mapping techniques keeping character bodies and optimization for animation in mind, and with focuses on bipedal bodies and hands.
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Rigging Characters
This module covers the process for setting up a model for animation, including building a skeleton for a model and attaching ("skinning") it. Includes creating interface controls for the animator to use, as well as creating IK solvers to control limbs. Also delves into understanding how characters will stand, sit, or walk in relation to the camera. Poses and staging are fundamental building blocks of animation. Focuses on traditional animation tricks to learn software techniques.
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Animation with Biped
Lots of time is spent here learning the theories of Motion, Timing, Squash & Stretch, Aniticipation, Overshoot, Follow-through, and much more. Teaches several ways of creating walk cycles and lip synchs, and explores the processes of expressing acting, emotion, and dialogue through facial animation techniques, including phonemes, facial posing, sliders, basic and complex expressions, asymmetry, and reading and noting dialogue tracks.
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Basic Character Animation
Character animation is about storytelling: motivation, conflict, and a path of action. You will learn to develop a story through premise, script, and storyboard, as well as the "tricks" of the animation trade, techniques for making characters seem alive: thinking, eye contact, snap, double-takes, staggers, laughter, etc. You will also learn about the physics of force and motion in order to represent gravity, balance & weight, mass, changing speed & direction, going up and down slopes, jumping, lifting, dancing, fighting, and much more.
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Other Characters
You will learn how to make characters tell believable stories, communicate with the audience and each other, and come alive on screen by understanding the techniques of acting. You'll learn how to create skeletons for and animate the motions of animals that are not human, and even out of inanimate objects! And finally, you will learn how to animate within the restrictions of game software, including limited detail, shared animation cycles, standard game moves, and dealing with platform limitations
| Week | Hours | Assignment | Exams | Subject (Click for more detail) |
| 1-10 | 200 | 9 | 1 | Modeling for Animation |
| 11-20 | 200 | 9 | 1 | Rigging Characters |
| 21-31 | 220 | 13 | 1 | Animation with Biped |
| 32-42 | 200 | 9 | 1 | Basic Character Animation |
| 43-52 | 200 | 8 | 1 | Other Characters |
Now What?
You've seen the benefits. We've proven the value. Now you should harness the power of an education and apply online, immediately, below.
