Using Control Rigs in Unreal Engine (Patreon)

Hello my people! Today I have the first of two UE Control Rig videos for you, in which we see what they are, why they’re useful and most importantly how to use them in. Control Rigs are objects that bind a figure’s bones with an object we can select and animate. It sounds crazy that there’s a separation between these two things, but programmatically I guess there is, and by default Unreal Engine doesn’t show us the skeleton to manipulate on the timeline (unless we’re adjusting data directly inside an animation sequence, which doesn’t show us the other objects in our scene).

Other apps have the same concept as well, but it’s implemented a bit more user friendly. Think about Daz Studio or Character Creator, where we just click on a part of a figure and move it around. Technically we’re not selecting the bones here, but instead an object that translates the values to the bones (like a node - bones are only visible if you go into some special editing mode). It’s the same in Unreal Engine, but these control nodes are not setup, so we have to do that manually. I’ll show you how to create such rigs in the next video.

For now, let’s take a look at how to use simple Control Rigs and start animating our figures directly inside the Sequencer. We can do this from scratch, or use existing animations and adjust them as needed by overriding things like arms digging into hips. Enjoy!

English Version: https://vimeo.com/927786802/7f71e92e00

German Version: https://vimeo.com/927786679/b415b1ec46