Character Rigging With Duik Bassel

What it actually teaches

This is a full-pipeline character rigging course for After Effects, built entirely around the free Duik Bassel script, and it earns its 229-minute runtime by refusing to skip steps. The course opens by explaining what rigging is for (turning a multi-layered illustration into a small set of controllers an animator can grab and pose) before touching software at all, then walks through four different character builds of increasing complexity: a textured human named Jake, a headless-body monster named Trevor, a longer-torso monster named Stu, and a clean vector character named Red. Rigging each one differently is the course's smartest structural choice, because it forces the viewer to see how design decisions (outlines vs. flat color, vector vs. raster, proportions) change the rigging approach rather than presenting one workflow and pretending it generalizes.

The early lessons on artwork preparation are more valuable than they sound. Building joints that don't look broken when they bend requires overlapping circular sections at each joint point, drawing characters in a stiff neutral pose at high resolution, and organizing Photoshop layers into folders that translate cleanly into After Effects pre-comps. None of this is exciting to explain, but skipping it is exactly what causes rigs to fall apart later, and the course treats it as seriously as it deserves.

The Duik-specific workflow

Once inside After Effects, the course moves through the puppet tool, Puppet Starch, and Duik's structures system (essentially a skeleton built independently of the artwork), then bones, parenting, and the Auto-Rig & IK button that converts all of that setup into a working, animatable rig in one click. The rigging-an-arm lesson functions as the conceptual template for everything after it: place pins, rename them, parent pieces together, then watch how moving one control drives the rest of the limb through inverse kinematics. Legs and spine are taught as variations on that same logic, and the course is honest that repeating the process across four characters is partly for reinforcement.

A mid-course composition-duration mistake gets left in and corrected on camera, and rather than being embarrassing, it's genuinely instructive. It shows how to retroactively fix duration and layer length across nested pre-comps without starting over, a real problem viewers will hit themselves.

The final stretch on the procedural walk cycle is a strong payoff. Parameters for head wobble, body bounce, hip swing, arm follow-through, and foot-ground contact are each demonstrated individually with visible before-and-after results, and the closing lesson is honest about the tool's limits: it's excellent for background characters or quick blocking, not a substitute for hand-animated walks on hero characters.

Where it falls short

The course explicitly and repeatedly states it is not for After Effects beginners, and that's the right call. Viewers who don't already have puppet tool, parenting, and layer-management muscle memory will struggle to keep pace, since those fundamentals are assumed rather than taught. The course also only scratches Duik's non-humanoid structures (tails, custom rigs, the connector tool) in a closing overview, leaving anyone rigging a four-legged creature or a prop without direct guidance. For its stated audience, though, the pacing, the four-character comparison structure, and the willingness to show and fix real mistakes make this one of the more thorough rigging courses available for the software.

What you will learn

• ·How to design and prep character artwork (layer splitting, circular overlapping joints, high-resolution neutral poses) so it survives rigging
• ·How to install and set up Duik Bassel and correctly import Photoshop/Illustrator artwork into After Effects
• ·How to place puppet pins, use Puppet Starch, and build Duik bone/structure hierarchies for arms, legs and spine
• ·How to parent artwork layers to structures and bones so the rig deforms correctly
• ·How to run Duik's Auto-Rig & IK feature and clean up the resulting controllers into an animator-friendly rig
• ·How to generate and customize a procedural walk cycle using Duik's automation tools