Hey Roger,
100% recommend School of Motion courses. I've done the C4D Holy Trinity of Basecamp, Ascent and Lights, Camera, Render.
Apologies for the lengthy reply, but hopefully it gives a good rundown of what to expect from each course and help you decide on a starting point.
I think there's a lot to be said for getting critiques on your homework and also going on a learning experience with others. SoM are starting on a new platform called Square and retiring the Facebook group which I'm sure will be for the better. The class will post their progress and others can comment or critique. The class consists of such a wide variety of backgrounds and experience that there will almost always be some golden nuggets of info shared.
When the course finishes you are then opened up to the alumni group. While Square is just starting to get populated I think once the next courses finish it'll bring a lot of new blood into it and create lots of new content.
I got my first ever freelancer gigs because of School of Motion so I'll always be grateful for that knowledge and experience.
C4D Basecamp - Even though I had been using C4D for several years I didn't feel like I was making any progress in learning it. After chatting with a friend that completed the AE Kickstarter I jumped into Basecamp. This course covers a lot of fundamentals of core C4D. You go over basic spline modeling, lighting, and animation. If you're already very comfortable with C4D then you may be good to go into Ascent.
Will list some examples of homework's I done for Basecamp
Images found here C4D Cafe Gallery | www.c4dcafe.com (core4d.com)
This homework is to animate the propellers on the plane and have it fly through rings
This one to animate the ball, characters and objects in scene
This is an unfinished one for using the mograph tools
I didn't do the last homework because they announced Ascent during the class so I went straight into that
C4D Ascent - I wrote a detailed comment in the School of Motion group on this that I'll copy over to here. I put a bunch of the animation homeworks from Ascent on this thread - Homeworks from C4D Ascent and Lights, Camera, Render courses by School of Motion - Feedback - Core 4D Community
Week 0 - Some cool abstract modelling techniques with some volume modelling basics. Render settings aren't gone through in this lesson which I think is to show how long an un-optimized scene can take to render.
Lesson 1 - Fundamentals of rendering. C4D native render engine used to explain each setting and how they apply to all render engines. Homework we're given scene & characters to texture, place and render with C4D Physical.
Lesson 2 - Deep dive of Redshift. (Volumetric, HDRI, Cameras, blurs and subsurface scattering). Homework is the lucky cats scene to texture, light and camera move.
Lesson 3 - Advanced materials using the headphones for the imperfections, decal etc. The homework is add material to headphones and scenes for 3 shots.
Lesson 4 - Mix 2D & 3D. Really cool lesson. Shown workflow for importing 2D animated sequence as a material and place them in the scene. The homework is arrange all the 2D assets in 3 scenes & render out a 1 minute finished piece.
Lesson 5 - Really awesome lesson on advanced mograph / fields. Shown how animation can be triggered by fields and effectors. Homework is 3 shot of drones. It's comes textured or can mix it up if have time. The drones are triggered to lift off using fields and then rail spline flight path out of a hanger.
Lesson 6 - Fields and vertex maps. Loved this one for all the potential use cases it can be applied to. Use vertex maps to reveal textures under textures, growth maps, indents in surfaces and bunch of other stuff. Homework was 3 shots of rolling balls revealing indent trail and triggering growth maps.
Lesson 7 - Rigid body dynamics of a ball going through a Rube Goldberg machine. Really great and tricky to get the ball movement right. Homework is getting the ball through the machine while staying in camera view.
Lesson 8 - Soft body dynamics. EJ runs through inflating/deflating objects. Having them interact with particles and surfaces. Really cool stuff. Homework is given a SOMOS logo and create any type of sim shots with it.
Bonus lesson is Andy Needham doing a quick overview of X-Particles which was great. He runs through a few cloth and liquid sims.
Lesson 9 - This is as far as I got until go back to it. I done the lesson which is rig and animate a robot arm lifting up an object. The homework is rigging and animate 2 robot arms putting a puzzle together or else can create own scene of robot arms doing their thing.
Lesson 10 - Rigging for mograph which I think is basic rigging of characters. From what I saw of classmates work it's getting 3 characters to dance in a scene.
Lesson 11 - Modelling for mograph. In this one it looks like EJ goes through modelling a pug and that's also the homework.
Lesson 12 - Final lesson. It's huge one where a voiceover, storyboard and mood board provided. Have to build the scenes up and render out a 30+ second advertisement for a procrastinating app.
Lights, Camera, Render! - This was the piece de resistance of School of Motion C4D learning. Truly awesome course given by a truly awesome person David Ariew. While this course is Octane centric there is valuable theory taught that can be applicable to any render. Some of my classmates completed this course in Blender and UE although I think converting the materials for some of the assets would take a long time.
David covers subjects like world building cyber city, nature scenes, space scenes, lighting, advanced camera work and animation.
You'd see in a previous link with the Ascent and LCR animation thread. Here I posted some of the stills that I done during the course
C4D Cafe Gallery | www.c4dcafe.com (core4d.com)
I'd highly recommend searching for Instagram tags from each course. Some of the homeworks that students do is outstanding.
#cinema4dbasecamp
#c4dascent
#lightscamerarender
I'm a bit tight for time so unfortunately can't give more info on LCR, just that it's amazing.
Don't hesitate to hit me up for any other questions you might have!
Best of luck if you do choose School of Motion. You absolutely won't regret it.
Ah brilliant! David provides a copy of his layout file so it's easier to follow the lessons. It's just that it's time consuming to do the lessons and then homeworks. The course is really geared for taking the knowledge and applying it well into the future. I can see myself referring back to these lessons for years. Will see you in the alumni groups after! I think the social part of the courses has moved from Facebook to SoM new platform 'The Block'. That's where the class with be introduced to each other. Doing Ascent after LCR would be good too, particularly if you'd like to know more on Redshift and other advanced mograph techniques.