Learn Manual Rigging in Blender with CGDive

If you’d like to learn rigging in Blender during 2024 /2025, look forward to my new beginner-friendly Manual Rigging Course: “Rigging isn’t Scary.”

Read below for all the details!

What you will get from the course

The full course will consist of 3 Levels. Level 1 and Level 2 are already finished, and Level 3 is in the works. The course will be officially released when all content has been recorded and edited!

• Level 1: Absolute Beginner [DONE]
• Level 2: Novice [DONE]
• Level 3: Intermediate [Work in Progress]

Get Notified

If you would like to get notified when the course is released, enter your name and email in the form below:

First Name:

Email:

Get Updates

Subscribe on YouTube

Alternatively, you can Subscribe to CGDive on YouTube.

Under Subscription, choose the “All” option. (All other subscription options will not notify for new content).

Course Breakdown

Level 1: Absolute Beginner [DONE]

Even if you’re starting from scratch with rigging, armatures, or bones, this level is designed to get you up to speed in just five short videos:

1. Bone Basics: Go from knowing nothing about bones to rigging your first character.

2. The Most important Rig Mechanism: Discover the one Blender constraint you absolutely need to know.

3. Weight Painting & Rig Improvements: learn my battle-tested weight painting workflow and make your rig more user-friendly.

4. Blender Animation Basics: While animation isn’t the main focus of this course, every rigger needs to know the basics. Create a walk cycle and learn essential animation concepts.

5. Challenge Time: rig something different (with a little help from me)

Level 2: Novice [DONE]

This level dives deeper into rigging fundamentals. You’ll learn essential concepts and create more advanced mechanisms. The difficulty remains manageable, easing you into more complex rigging techniques:

1. Fundamentals #1: Use anatomy as a guide for proper bone placement and learn precision techniques

2. Fundamentals #2: gain a solid understanding of bone roll, a concept that even advanced users often struggle with.

3. Mechanisms #1: Wrist & Shoulder Twist. Learn how to create corrective “twist” bones.

4. Mechanisms #2: Hips and Foot Setup

5. Pro-Level Bone Shapes (Widgets): Make your rig look professional

6. Deeper into Weight Painting: Explore advanced ways to assign weights and understand what really happens when you use “Automatic Weights.”

7. Cool Novice Rigging Tricks: Learn Blender’s “Magic Modifier,” correctly use “Preserve Volume”, and grasp the basics of Euler and Quaternion (I promise to keep it simple! 😊).

8. NOVICE CHALLENGE – Face Rigging : Rig a character’s face with my guidance.

Level 3: Intermediate [Work in Progress]

The goal of this level is to create a fairly advanced rig– think of Blender’s Rigify Human rig (but without squash and stretch). It will feature:

• Advanced twisting mechanisms.
• IK-FK switching.
• Limb isolation.
• A more complex foot setup.
• Shapekeys
• and more.. 🙂

You’ll also dive into concepts like shapekeys, drivers, and properties. Together, we’ll create a shapekey-based face rig!

Yes, you are going to make this! Thanks to the foundations laid in Levels 1 and 2, the difficulty will remain manageable—even for an intermediate project like this.

Get Notified

If you would like to get notified when the course is released, enter your name and email in the form below:

First Name:

Email:

Get Updates

Subscribe on YouTube

Alternatively, you can Subscribe to CGDive on YouTube.

Under Subscription, choose the “All” option. (All other subscription options will not notify for new content).