Make Faster Control Rigs in Unreal

Here's how I make control rigs in unreal quickly without writing a lot of nodes.
_____________________________
/ woodydevs
/ woodydevs
/ discord
_____________________________
#unrealengine5 #vtuber #animation

[@JPMcBoyfriendFace]

If anyone is wondering which array is which at 3:00, the idea of a forwards solve is that you want the bones to follow the controls. So what he's doing here is he's binding the transform of the bones to the transform of the controls. The array on the far left is the BONE array and the array on the right is the CONTROLS array. It reads: Foreach bone, get the Control at the same index and set the transform of the bone to the control's transform. Absolutely ruthless video editing for a person trying to follow along, minimizing the arrays so they don't show which name and hard cutting the video is like punching someone in the throat while they're doing the cinnamon challenge. Devious

[@ydvisual5530]

J P - Cool thanks for explaining that. I was going through the tutorial and I thought to myself, "I bet someone left a comment about which array was which". First comment seen was yours, haha. Thanks again. Thanks Woody Devs - This is a good start for beginners like me who have never made a control rig ever in UE5.1. Make some more intermediate ones too please !! Thanks everyone!

[@xewi60]

thank you you saved my sanity

[@shingAMarie]

So how do you move a control with blueprint code?

[@JohnLeBoeufLittle]

This was legit a help, thank you, was going crazy trying to figure that out.

[@WitlessEntertainment]

thank christ. Been seeing some big rig no nos in some of these UE5 videos and glad to see yours is pretty good!

[@WacMilk]

Works like a charm, this bypasses fiddling around with the twistbones setup in default skeletons

[@buystander]

YEY!!!! A decent Backward Solve Tutorial!!! This is gonna help a lot. Thanks

[@unrealdevop]

This is great, I recently discovered the first part and then the actual setup worked great.

[@WoodyDevs]

That’s great to hear.

[@liuzzivfx9413]

You don't have to go through and make that selection twice, you can just drag it out first and make the array, THEN create the controls for selected joints

[@jackandrory6839]

Where do you find THEN create the controls for selected joints please?

[@Madmonkeman]

I'll comment this to save you all a massive headache that I went through when trying to edit animations. With the FORWARDS solve the one on the left is the BONES array and the one on the right is the CONTROLS array. Then for the BACKWARDS solve the one on the left is the CONTROLS array and the one on the right is the BONES array.

[@JumboTTV]

Hey Woody! I've just been following a course on the Unreal Learning hub and I noticed something that could help you. If you hold ctrl and press (.) You can manipulate the shape scale and rotation etc without affecting the offset and the child controls.. Thanks for this video it really sped up adding the controls :)

[@WoodyDevs]

that’s awesome! I’ll look into that!

[@thomashalpin2251]

Dude, This is the best control rig video I've seen! You made it so simple. Any chance on getting a continuation of this by building IK into it with an IK/FK switcher?

[@WoodyDevs]

Probably at some point. I use the IK's to run my realtime motion capture from the animation blueprint, so I figured I'd rollup IK in a video about how to do that.

[@hotsauce7124]

@@WoodyDevs Looking forward to this

[@grittylittlefilms]

I would love to have IK implemented in that simple solution as well!! love it

[@Uchidan]

Followed exactly and my skeleton got all messed up...Deleted it and did it again exactly. Same result...

[@pinaboytoons]

Super helpful! Thank you!

[@pinaboytoons]

Subbed!

[@Malachism]

This was great. Big thanks for the help. Maybe you can think of some cons about this technique? What are some future limitations I'll have doing it this way?

[@PikBo100]

ik is not attached to bones, when move these circles nothing happens

[@resproject1731]

Thank You verrrryyy much!!!

[@hotsauce7124]

Thank you!!!

[@YUXE_]

very usefull ! thx

[@lukisio13]

3:00 which array is which?

[@gregaze]

yeah so all this did was stretch my character out and break all of his bones so i think i have no choice but to give up on control rigs

[@shingAMarie]

I’m watching all these tutorials and I’m trying to learn it in a simple way but things get over complicated when you spend so much time on the aesthetics. So how do you move each control part with blueprint code? That’s exactly what I’m looking for but no tutorial is being straightforward about telling me how

[@WoodyDevs]

You don't have to use the control shapes. Transform nodes will change where the bones end up. You just need to input data to them.

[@shingAMarie]

@@WoodyDevs and how do you do that?

[@WoodyDevs]

@@shingAMarie The variables section is where you can keep that data

[@RolyPolyGames]

Well, gonna have to give this a go! Still find myself struggling with getting arms to turn and rotate properly. There is something going on with lowerarm and upperarm twists but I really can't find much on them. If you have any idea on rigging up arms and getting them to twist proper I'd appreciate a video. Or a link to anything you know that can help explain it! I was hoping the FPS arms that came with the FPS tutorial would have rigging models with them but it seems they didn't control rig these for some bizarre reason.

[@sinqzedits2383]

dont use the twist one sorry its kinda late ig but just use all the other one but the twist i had that issue and then when i twist the wrist and everything was distorted just use upper arm and lower arm and it will work fine and everything else ofcourse just not twist ones worked for me

[@justanothergamedev8643]

Im having a bit of a problem, I set up IK for the arms (first person template) and the shoulder will rotate in unnatural ways, like full 180:s on the z axis, making the part that connects to the body (if there was a full body) on the wrong side

[@ecpeter]

Quick easy and to the point! This is a great tutorial and I made my first rig with it on a Robot model I had. Thanks for posting and if there is sequel to this please let me know. My mistake and I was getting some errors when saving my 1st attempt was mixing up the "Rig Element Key Arrays", once I swapped them they worked and saved well (the model wasn't moving at all at the joints until I fixed that).

[@SathishKoththolla]

bones are not moving with control . what must be the issue ?

[@LSDeIicious]

I tried following your instructions but came across a problem! The Get Transform - Bone into Set Transform - Bone, it displays an orange warning under the Get Transform node. It says: "Item ' ' is not valid." The rig ends up falling flat on it's face! I tried deviating from your lesson but wasn't able to get any sort of work-around! Any feedback might be helpful.

[@yearight1205]

Any chance you could revisit this but add IK Rig to it? This is just an easier to grab FK rig =(

[@ljfproduction]

Doesnt work.. i did everything like you did but no bodypart actually moves.. only the circle around it

[@MaxStudioCG2023]

wow ...this is amazing ...i done control rig in hafe hour (with seting colors and shit) after i been 2 days watching videos and trying around things from youtube :))))))))))))

[@dwho1029]

Your tutorial is amzing! But even I didn't press play level button, the live link is working and my avatar is moving. any Idea why?

[@andresca1985]

i can see the control rigg out of sencuencer? or is only inside secuencer?

[@khallkhall7237]

MBIC: A ray.

[@orenders]

you did a cut too much on montage, some nodes appear from cuts, cant follow this guide !

[@fasecero]

Works great for rotation, but what about moving the controls? They just detach from the body.

[@WoodyDevs]

This is how FK's are designed to work. An IK rig is what you want for that!

[@AntrygJones]

That's the quick and dirty way, but you lose a lot of functionality doing it like that. I personally recommend breaking up the body parts into their own functions for ik&fk or splines, then assembling those functions on the main graph and inputting the correct names or items through arrays. Comes out a lot cleaner that way.

[@WoodyDevs]

For sure! This was absolutely intended as quick and dirty. Right now I see people either A: using one-to-one control to bone code or B: writing for loops with brute force name searches. this was intended as "The fastest way to create an FK rig" without building something too "out there"

[@ShalowRecord]

do you know any that's reliable on youtube but that isn't too detailed

[@bighitdigitalmedia]

in the place of rig element array,i am getting only item array.

[@kirillivanov9638]

is there a way to make all the bones visible in the viewport without selecting them?

[@WoodyDevs]

I haven't come across one yet that's very convenient at runtime. But you can turn on bone visualizations in control rig.

[@jackthewhite12]

why does everyone skip the fingers, I got most of the basic control done but like everyone skips the fingers so I have no idea how to setup them up

[@WoodyDevs]

It works pretty much the same way as everything else. You'll probably want to generate the lists separately though. It just gets harder to manage that many parts. The tutorial here should consistently cover them.

[@semmert]

sigh... literally the first step doesn't work for me.

[@JorgePerez-ek5gs]

Hi! I keep getting a Compile Error that says that my Control Array Index are Out Of Bounds... Anyone knows how to solve that? I'm using Unreal Engine 5.2

[@justanothergamedev8643]

Im having a problem where the rig becomes gigantic whenever I drag it out into the viewport, got any fix for that?

[@WoodyDevs]

Yep. Check your scaling. For blender folks you’re going to need to adjust the world scalp to .01 and the model to 100x to get proper unreal rig scale.

[@justanothergamedev8643]

@@WoodyDevs I was using the default arms and followed a tutorial on rigging it and then it's big when i drag it out and animate and then when i turn off the animator it returns to normal scale and if I bake the animation and use it the mesh becomes big again, I think I might have given a bit to little info on the original post

[@justanothergamedev8643]

I might just try to redo it again to see if that fixes it

[@justanothergamedev8643]

Quick followup, I redid everything and it works perfectly this time!

[@KayoWR]

i followed everything at 4:00 but when i try rotating the rig ctrl bones is doesnt work it says its rotating but i dont see anything moving

[@littlealdie8798]

I've got the same problem, did you find out ?

[@KayoWR]

@@littlealdie8798 nah sorry he still hasn’t answered

[@unrealdevop]

Same problem here

[@littlealdie8798]

Hello! Since the time I found the solution! To rotate controlers and put the mesh in normal : rotate then right click on the concerned controlers and "set shape from current"

[@palissebenoit9469]

Hey @RedCryptic, did you find the solution for this ? Nothing move when I try to move rig ctrl...

[@sunny99179]

You model, you rigged on blender??

[@blackivy011]

This doesn't work in Unreal 4 because you can't select and create many controls at once and keep them in a hierarchy. Unless I'm doing it wrong. Anyone have success with this in UE4?

[@WoodyDevs]

It probably doesn't. Control rig gets a lot of updates between versions.

[@blackivy011]

@@WoodyDevs so would you say the best way for ue4 is to just go bone by bone as of now?

[@WoodyDevs]

@@blackivy011 That's how I was doing it in ue4. Part of why I made this is for people to stop doing that in 5.

[@shadowtjnl]

Well it can be a good tutorial.. but now your avatar is placed on top of all the actions you do.... makes it not good at all :(

[@shadowtjnl]

please next time check where you place you screen avatar on the video... that helps a lot :)

[@WoodyDevs]

That’s definitely a consideration. Thanks for the feedback