Creating Control Rigs in Unreal Engine (Patreon)

Hello Supporters! As promised, here’s the second UE Control Rig video, in which I’ll explain how to create these things from scratch. This is (currently, as of UE 5.3) a necessary process, without which we won’t be able to make adjustments like I’ve shown you in the previous video. This requires a bit of Blueprint hacking, but it’s not that difficult when you’ve done it a few times.

Trust me when I say I really don’t like the way this is implemented, but it’s as good as it gets for now. In the upcoming Unreal Engine 5.4 update this process may become a little easier via drag-and-drop and Modular Control Rigs, but it still helps to understand the manual setup for fault finding and studying/amending existing rigs.

I’ll admit that Control Rigs can get complex very fast, with proxy controllers and IK chains, but for simple animations we really don’t need any of that stuff. All we need is to select the bones we want to manipulate, create control properties for them, get/set values from one to the other and we’re ready to animate. Everything else is entirely optional.

Creating these rigs works great for any figure or object that is rigged. This includes Daz and Reallusion figures, but also car doors, treasure chests and tails of evil monsters.

Daz characters are a little special in that the Daz to Unreal plugin is trying to be “helpful” in providing a pre-populated Control Rig; sadly it’s completely broken in the current version, so if you’re trying this on a Daz character, remove everything you see in that Blueprint and start again from scratch.

Enjoy and have fun with Unreal Engine: The Tinkerer’s Choice. 😄

• English Version: https://vimeo.com/927786751/86e2220d6c

• German Version: https://vimeo.com/927786670/ab066ce26c