We’re delighted to welcome members of the Unreal Engine Animation Team—Jeremiah, Kiaran, Paddy, and Tom—to this month’s Ask Unreal Anything!
This AMA-style event is your chance to receive real-time answers to questions on everything animation, from Control Rig and character physics, to gameplay animation systems, retargeting, locomotion system development, and other more. We’re also happy to discuss overarching development guidance, career advice, industry questions, and general questions about the guests—we all need to know Daniel’s cat’s name.
Jeremiah Grant is the Technical Product Management Director for Animating and Rigging in Unreal Engine. With over 16 years of experience in game development and film VFX, Jeremiah continues to bring his passion for approachable character development to the visual arts communities.
Kiaran Ritchie, Principal Animation Programmer, specializes in rigging, IK and retargeting. Kiaran has three kids and spends most of his free time roaming around the mountains of British Columbia.
Paddy Walker is the Sr. Technical Product Manager for Runtime and Gameplay Animation in Unreal Engine. Prior to Epic, he worked at Electronic Arts for 16 years, and Skydance New Media. Paddy has two human children and one fur baby, enjoys motorsports and sleeping, when possible.
Tom Sarkanen leads the Animation Runtime as Lead Animation Programmer, supporting and developing the nitty-gritty bits of the Unreal Engine’s animation systems. Between that and wrangling his two kids, he also occasionally makes cheese from his garage in the English countryside.
GUIDELINES
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Does Epic envision a time, or anytime soon, when machine learned neural network animation for non-bipedal characters will be viable within the projects. For example, Mode-Adaptive Neural Networks for Quadraped Motion Control shown at SIGGRAPH 2018 ( link : [SIGGRAPH 2018] Mode-Adaptive Neural Networks for Quadruped Motion Control - YouTube )
What features UE5 have for easy animation for archiviz?
I come from twinmotion and there we can easily place animated people, animals, cars, doors etc. We can also make them follow paths, like in people walking in a sidewalk or cars in a road.
At the moment, multiple elements from twinmotion still can’t be imported to UE5, like paths, animated humans, weather effects, particles and sections. How can we have those animation features (and maybe more) in UE5?
Can you explain how you use all of the ik bones in the standard mannequin? For example, what is the purpose of ik_hand_root? What are your standard procedures for animating characters holding weapons and other props using those ik bones, such as ik_hand_gun? Sometimes a character might hold a weapon with their left hand while reaching for a magazine with their right, and how would you switch between those on the fly in the anim blueprint while using the ik bones?
With all the different animation layer channels and methods of keeping an Animatior workflow going with the use of the Character Rig with IK and FK controls while leveraging retargeting data and physics. What system are preventing all this from causing a ‘gimbal lock’ scenario where two axis overlap each other and fight? Is this simply due to how Unreal works with rotation order, or is there a filter that keeps things from shooting off the charts like the Euler Filter in Maya?
What is the general idea of the Anim Montages? All its features can be reproduced in State Machines.
As a tech animator I become anger when I see a lot of Slots in Anim Graphs. In this case I must check EventGraph/CharacterBP to find all the Montages corresponding to each Slot.
It makes it harder to read someone else’s code.
It seems with UE5, I need a pretty beefy GPU in the development phase to take advantage of real time lighting (RayTrace & GI ). Once compiled into an EXE, does the end user also need a high end GPU to get the same real time lighting effects?
Is there a way to add additional control rig controls to already an existing Metahuman Control Rig?
Essentially adding controls for things like props / apparel / jewellery etc.
Where do the specific Metahuman Control Rigs live in the Content folder?
Are there plans to support control rig controls being able to interact with other objects in the scene?
Imagine these scenarios when animating with control rig in engine:
space switching a character’s ik hand control with a lever in the world
space switching one character’s hand with another character’s hand to animate them shaking hands
space switching with a gun’s magazine when making weapon reload animations
So far the closest thing I found is the snapper tool but it bakes keyframes rather than letting you space switch.
It’s also very difficult to align controls with other controls or objects and the snapper tool occasionally works, but it requires baking over at least 2 keyframes, so I have to manually delete the second keyframe. All the usual tools that work in the editor don’t work with controls since they’re not actors or components, and the options aren’t there that you get when working with those objects.
After the release of UE5, Metahumans and some non-epic tools such as CC4, we have a lot of new cutting edge toys to play with. What could be the most efficient solution or approach for creating core character animation system that supports different body types: human, dwarf, giant, elf etc. (male/female). And can you recommend some good looking character and character clothing production flow for this purposes for a relatively small team (developer, character artist and animation artist)
Hi team, could you go into the difficulty of making physics, and especially cape physics or a variation thereof work on the Nintendo Switch version of Fortnite? Obviously there’s pretty harsh limitations to the hardware, but it seems like everything but the cape physics works as intended, while cape physics are a mixed bag at best, and basically non existent at worst.
With the new IK Retargeting workflow, what do you do about socketed items? The naive way, attaching to the “animation mesh”, results in an offset to your rendered character. What are some ways to fix this issue?
