Animation Instruction?
polycounter lvl 2
Can anyone suggest some online animation classes or one-on-one animation mentoring for a reasonable fee? I am already aware of resources such as CGSociety, the Gnomon workshop, Lynda and Digital Tutors. I am specifically interested in 3D animation (not modeling) at an intermediate/advanced level.
Replies
Animation Mentor focuses just on animation, it mostly follows a feature film workflow with most of it's mentors coming from Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and BlueSky and most of it's top talent students landing jobs at those places. It's fairly pricey but what you get out is top notch. I know quite a few people who have gone this route and work in games, it's hard to tell if AM made them great animators or if they had what it takes all long and AM just helped them polish their skills.
https://www.ianimate.net/
iAnimate is another online course that focuses on animation but is geared a little more toward games. There is a lot more overlap between film and games with that gap shrinking a little bit every day but still there are and will probably always be fundamental differences in how you approach certain animations. iAnimate tends to make you aware of those differences and prepare you to work in either.
http://www.animschool.com/
AnimSchool also has a good reputation with a lot of rock solid instructors.
Digital Tutors, Lynda and even Gnomon tend to focus on teaching application knowledge, teaching you what buttons do and don't really help you get into the mindset of an animator. You miss out on a lot of the tips and tricks that comes from being a production animator working in the industry under a deadline.
But with that said, there are a lot people out there that don't have a formal education and haven't spent a lot of money. They have done a great job of teaching themselves using a mishmash of rigs out there and most of these places have free rigs you can download and expereiment with.
AnimSquad is another similar to the ones Mark posted above. It's the newer of the bunch, but Ive heard good things.
Ive personally done classes at animation mentor, ianimate, and animSchool. They are honestly all worth it. Mark mentioned that iA is a little more geared towards games, but i`ll disagree with that. If you want to be a games animator, yes, i would suggest iA first. But only cause they have a really nice dedicate games animation course. I think it's 4 different workshops now? But, they started out as a feature animation course. So its really what you choose to take. If you take the feature classes, you wont be learning about game animation.