Creative Decision – Modular Rig to save time
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.
I went to the discord Unreal community group and asked around to know the new version of unreal (UE 5.3) has a new experimental feature called “Modular rig”. This generates a control rig on a skeleton mesh by drag and drop technique inside of Unreal Engine. The only problem I have with this is the control rig can only be used inside of unreal engine. I feel like I should start working inside of unreal engine to avoid wasting the time.
