Mentoring programs?

I'm a full stack web developer and do a lot of open source work. At my company we also have a code mentoring program for people coming out of school, and so was thinking about this a bit as I've been learning unity for the past week or two.

I'm curious if there's official or unofficial mentoring programs for unity and related pipelines? A place where I can trade some knowledge that I possess (ruby, javascript, c#, good practices, etc.), to learn the process of modeling, rigging and animating. Both are non-trivial endeavors, take considerable work to be proficient in and often at considerable cost.

So I'm sitting here in Maya, learning how to rig a model that I purchased, having reasonable success, but still have a very weak grasp of some of the things that exist within it. Heh, like I just noticed the sculpting tab.

Anyway, there's great video tutorials online, but there's nothing like a good few hour long screen sharing session where another person teaches you something rad that's relevant to what you want to learn, and can answer questions about the process as they come up.

Would this be something others would be interested in? A system that can pair you up with someone that can teach you something you don't know, and that wants to learn something that you know -- or to people interested in mentoring others -- we've found that we actually learn a lot by mentoring others and so there's great value in doing it.

Thoughts? (intentionally did not create a poll)

 

I can't speak to your question positively, as I am a working class individual with a family so adding onto my already very tight workload and day with a screen sharing type deal isn't something that sounds appealing to me. At the end of the day I'd much rather learn at my own pace anything I find I need additional information about, but I do agree teaching is one of the best learning experiences you can have.
Others in different stages of life, with different situations may find your knowledge sharing idea interesting.

Strictly speaking about 3D learning paths - I was taught 3D in college, then went to a company where somehow I ended up being the most knowledgeable person in the room - needing to teach other artists the fine craft of 3D animation and all the workflows and techniques that come along with animation development.
I ended up teaching about 10 artists throughout my time at that company, in different phases of instruction and I can honestly tell you teaching someone 3D from the ground up - instead of teaching them only one specific subject - is a much better process and has lasting results.
The individuals I taught starting at the simplest basics of x,y,z coordinates, perspective vs orthographic, the makeup of a 3D mesh, splines, all the way into 3D post fx, rigging and advanced lighting techniques, ended up being much better artists/animators in the end than the artists who I was only able to give instruction to on specific animation tasks and who learned peace meal after getting instruction on animation.

For you - I'd like to kindly suggest learn everything you can about 3D creation beginning with modeling and texturing. If you haven't modeled and textured a character I would suspect rigging is kind of daunting (not overwhelming) and skinning and animation will probably be just as difficult especially when you get to a point where some things aren't animating as they should. With a solid basis in 3D model creation and texture development, any errors you run into further down the line will be more obvious and easier to fix when you have that basic experience knowing how to model and texture. Simple artist friendly advice from me to you.
Happy Rigging!