This week we looked at Control Rigs in Unreal Engine 5 where we started by adding a Control Rig in the content browser via the Animation section. By creating a Modular Rig, we added the Unreal default mannequin’s skeletal mesh into the blueprint.
We dragged and dropped the rig module into the sockets available in the skeletal mesh and added everything to the character.
We also looked at the module settings to change the size or colours of the controllers according to our preferences.
Then we moved on to the second type of rigging method which we learnt using a octopus model. We started by editing the skeleton, and set the root bone transform to 0. We deleted the existing bones of the arms and left the shoulder as is. Then we added joints from the shoulder by clicking on the arms and add as many bones as we wanted and proceeded to bind the skin.
We then added the control rig samples pack from Fab into our projects. Then we created a regular control rig for the octopus and imported the octopus in the rig hierarchy to look at chain hierarchy.
We then selected the Bone > Right Click > New Control to create a controller for the shoulder and the last joint of the arm. To ensure its not a child, we pressed Shit + P on the controller. We then created a parent constraint and assigned the root bone in the name section. Then we parented the root bone control and attached that to the bone. This ensured that the controller can transform the bone it is assigned to. We did that to all the shoulders then.
Then we added SpringInterp and turned it into a vector. We dragged and dropped the last bone of the arm into the graph and clicked on get bone. We connected the translation to the target. We then dragged the control of the same bone and clicked on set control and joined translation to the result.
Then we created an Aim Constraint and defined the name and the target of the arm in the node from where the aim starts and where the aim ends. We set the Aim Control’s parent type to Control and attached the execute node from the Parent Constraint to the Set Transform’s execute. We then connected that to the Aim Constraint.
Then we tried rigging a human character from what we learnt so far in the class using all the nodes and it allowed us to better understand how characters are prepared for animation, emphasising the importance of proper joint placement and control creation.