Animation Fundamentals – How to Rig Your First Character in Cinema 4D+

Hellooo! I’m Russ Etheridge, today we’re going to take a closer look at the rigging tools in Cinema 4D. By the end of the class you’ll be able to set up your own character rig for posing and animation!

This class will be perfect for people wanting to get a handle on the rigging tools in C4D, or those wanting to start 3D character animation. It’s also a great next step for those who have recently completed my previous class ‘Modelling in Cinema 4D’. Last time we posed a character in the scene using modelling techniques which isn’t ideal. This class will teach you how to do it the right way.

We will be covering:

An introduction to Joints – A super simple explanation of joints and how they’re used. An introduction to adding IK to your joints, and hopefully explain what the heck IK is! An introduction to Binding and Weights – this is how to attach your mesh to your joints.

After that we’ll be ready to make a Full Character Rig! It’s a simple character but it’ll be fully animatable. For this, we’ll be using the boat character from my modeling class as a base.

And finally we’ll be Binding that character to the rig with what we’ve learnt about Weighting.

This will be the first of a two part class, in the second one we’ll be looking at rigging a bike and attaching the character to the bike ready for animation. So follow me on here or on social media for updates. You can follow the links on my profile page.

There’s also a couple of bonus videos attached to this class which I’ll be posting over on my brand new YouTube channel! One will be an overview of the incredibly useful character object in C4D which is a user friendly way to build preset rigs, another one going through an alternative to binding, and also my animation process for creating the final bike animation.

I hope that once you have completed this course you’ll have the skills to get a character model ready for animation as well as the basic knowledge to start rigging anything that needs to get moving! So lets get to it!