#control rig

While working on the first animation, run animation, I had the problem with the character rig. The character was imported from the Unreal Marketplace, which came along with multiple animations. The character had a skeleton mesh with appropriate names however, the character did not have any control rig to it.

This is my first-time creating 3D gameplay animation, I am not experienced in creating a control rig. I used different ways creating control rig. I used the auto-rig tool inside MAYA. The problem I faced using it was it is more efficient if you have created the bones and skeleton inside MAYA as it does not pick up some joints.

The second tool I used was advanced skeleton. Although better than the MAYA’s auto-rig tool, advanced skeleton creates its own skeleton and creates a control rig on it. This is a very useful tool if the mesh does not have any skeleton in it. The reason of not using advanced skeleton is because apart from the gameplay animations I’m going to be making, my groupmate would be using the animation pack that came with the character for other animations which will not be possible if I changed the skeleton of the mesh.

 I used other tools as well, like AnimPicker but I was not able to generate a control rig on the skeleton mesh. I tried to make the control rig on the character manually inside Unreal.

After searching for some time, I found out that in the new version of Unreal Engine 5.4 uses a new feature called the “Modular Rig”. It takes the characters bones and asks you to tell the tool where what bone is. After assigning the bones, the tool automatically creates an unreal engine control rig.

The modular rig did create the control rig. But even then, there was a problem with the mesh. I was unable to move the hands using IK rig. The rig was only FK. The mesh breaks whenever I tried to move the part of the body, there were no constraint attached to him.

I sent this to Malcom, our rigging teacher, and he showed me how to switch IKs and FKs in this modular rig. There were some naming problems with the bones which he fixed for me and made my work a lot easier.

Above is a screenshot Malcom sent to let me know how to switch between IKs and FKs.

I also asked and found out that I cannot import control rigs from Unreal Engine to Maya (or vice versa), so I was unable to animate it in Maya. Since I have already spent a lot of time on this, I decided to just animate inside of Unreal Engine using the sequencer.

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