Ask Unreal Anything: Animation | July 13, 2022 at 11AM EDT

[TomSarkanen]

@Headcloud

Are there any plans to support fast server-side hit detection similar to the modifications made by the Valorant team at Riot?

We are not planning on integrating Valorant’s engine modifications (such as the recording of animation graph state to enable server-side rollback). We are however taking the requirements on board with regards to planning future animation logic-related features.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@cyaoeu

In control rig development, are there any plans for further QOL UI features for control rig?

For example it would be nice to have a Blender style Parent: bone/control selection dropdown in the details panel so you don’t have to drag everything around in the hierarchy.

Also curious if the animation team have anything they would like to have in control rig that’s not there right now.

Control Rig is continually being improved and refined. We have many plans for where Control Rig is headed and look forward to sharing more information soon. We always welcome workflow and feature suggestions!

[SuprPaddyO]

@GON_GOMASO

Last question. When I blend to false, is there any way when coming back to true to DO NOT reset the sequence animation, because I would like to stay the animation in the same place it was when becoming true, so y can freeze it and come back in the same point it was before, I mean a way to stop the animation and then resume in same place

You can’t change the reset child on activation dynamically, but your options would be:

• Make a C++ Anim Node Function library that allows changing that value
• Make an anim node function to do this when you need to
  -Store playback time
  -Restore playback time

2nd option should be doable in blueprint, but it won’t scale if your graph branch is more complex

[Cory_Dornbusch]

Thank you for looking out for the artist! It hard to learn a tool workflow in different programs when we been using one way for 15+ years and that was the only way we been operating.

It is exciting to see how fast artist will get as the product matures and the user base become more fluent and adoption grows!

[TomSarkanen]

@GON_GOMASO

Last question. When I blend to false, is there any way when coming back to true to DO NOT reset the sequence animation, because I would like to stay the animation in the same place it was when becoming true, so y can freeze it and come back in the same point it was before, I mean a way to stop the animation and then resume in same place

From your screenshot it appears that you are running 4.x. This is not really very easy to do in older versions of the engine, however in 5.0 we added “Anim Node Functions” - these allow you to write functions in BP/native that will be called at specific points in anim graph execution, for example “OnBecomeRelevant”. In that function you would then have full control over what the sequence player was doing, e.g. select a new animation/start time or not.

The Lyra sample provides some good examples of using anim node functions.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@SmilegateAsset02

When two characters with different sizes use the same control rig, if in the setup event I snap the Head controller transform to the head bone transform, then in-game the head bone location is set different depending on what preview skeletal mesh is used in the Control Rig editor.

For example, if in the Control rig preview I select a tall character, then in-game, the short character´s head is stretched to the tall character´s head location.
Basically, retargeting doesn´t seem to work if I pass location and I was wondering what the best way is to share control rigs across multiple size characters

I’m not sure of the exact cause of this issue, but there could be several causes.

1. Ensure you’re using the latest UE5 release. I think there was previously a bug related to this
2. The Setup Event should be querying Initial Transform to set Control transforms.

[KiaranRitchie]

@dampflokfreund

Hi there!

Now with modern GPUs having matrix accelerators like tensor and XMX cores, how will UE5 integrate real time machine learning for animation and physics in the near future?

We are always evaluating where machine learning can provide solutions across the engine.

We recently released the “ML Deformer” plugin which uses an offline process to train a neural network to reproduce mesh deformations (at runtime) that match any arbitrary offline deformations.

There are several other areas of research utilizing ML for animation related technology. And we are refining our toolset to better support developers who wish to utilize ML in Unreal.

[SuprPaddyO]

We have plans to make it a lot easier for users to create paths and then get characters to nicely follow those paths from the AI and Motion Matching tooling side, I can’t speak to the other area’s though unfortunately.

[TomSarkanen]

@sk0gg

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?

Thanks for the bug report - we will look into it!

[SuprPaddyO]

@Element808

Is there any current training that you suggest that can walk someone who is not an animator, but may wear multiple hats on a project, an in-depth guide on how to take a MetaHuman character and create basic locomotion animations using Control Rig? Is this even possible with Control Rig only?

I refer you to the documentation on animating a Metahuman:

Animating MetaHumans

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@HHornstein

How would one go about animating a clear sphere that has character animations inside of it?

You could create an Actor Blueprint that contains both the sphere and the character inside it. As long as they’re not parented to each other, you should be able to animate the sphere without rotating your character inside.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@cheeseyscones

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?

MetaHumans provides a good example of how to combine modular props/apparel together into a single character. I recommend adding additional props, clothing, etc. in the same way - as a new skeletal mesh that is added to the BP, using Post Process Animation Blueprints or Master Pose to attach to the MH. This can have its own Control Rig for custom animation.

The best way to find MH Control Rigs is to use the Content Browser’s Filter functionality and filter by Control Rigs in the project.

[KiaranRitchie]

@Peter_Shoferistov

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)

Creating an animation pipeline to support differently proportioned characters requires some pre-planning and careful setup.

First and foremost is to ensure that your characters share the same Skeleton asset and have identical reference poses (I recommend the A-pose).

Then make sure that the Skeleton bone translation retarget settings are setup correctly. Usually the Pelvis is set to “Animation Relative”. This ensures that the height of the hips will playback correctly on characters of different heights.

The rest of the skeleton is usually best set to “Skeleton”. This ensures the bone’s translation remains at the proportions coming from the Skeletal Mesh, not the translation from the animation sequence. You will know you got this correct when your “dwarf” animation does not squash your “giant” down to dwarf proportions.

This concludes the basic “translation retargeting” setup.

From here, there are things you will have to do to “fix up” contact points. IK bones are often added to skeletons and baked to “contact” points (like door knobs) in animations that have contact in them. These IK bones can then be used as target IK locations directly in an IK Rig or Control Rig at runtime (and blended on/off as needed depending on the context).

If you are looking to copy animation to a different skeletal mesh to modify it (for example to customize your dwarf animation to look better on a giant) then you would be best served by the IK Retargeting system that can bake out new animation sequences and provide more control over how the retarget is applied.

Modular clothing remains a tough challenge. There are no magic solutions here that enable sharing of clothing assets between different proportions. There are offline solutions that can accelerate the creation of meshes for different proportions (like Wrap 3d). But this may be out of the scope for smaller teams.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@ITOps

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.

Creating assets like Capes that can be attached to any character and still look great on a single platform is a complex problem. Combining that with a wide range of platforms that games like Fortnite support greatly increases the complexity.

For tutorials about Cloth Simulation in UE, check out the tutorials available here: Epic Developer Community Learning | Tutorials, Courses, Demos & More – Epic Developer Community

[KiaranRitchie]

@PrimeAnimation

Thanks for the reply! Honestly, this helps my project quite a bit as I have been searching and trying many things to get more Mobu like controls at runtime(Pin hands/Feet ect.) and sounds like this is still in the works!

You can “pin” hands/feet using IK in the retargeter by selecting the bone chain with the IK goal you want to pin and set “Blend to Source” to 1.0 (default is 0).

It will position the IK at the location of the source bone. So for example if you used “Blend to Source” on the arms in a “open door” animation, the character’s hands would go to the door knob regardless of how tall they are.

There are many other features like this in the chains settings and more to come!

[PrimeAnimation]

Well the issue here is it doesn’t scale, https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ue5-ik-rig-retarget-with-actor-scale/536222 which I need to globally scale my rig tot he actor for the day. I’m sure there’s a way from there to figure it out, but I just haven’t been able to get scaling my actor and controlling the source blends to work the way Mobu does.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@YuuJin

• is it planned to get pose assets into control rig? would make it easy for some things to just have a few pose assets and then animate curves to blend between them. and have those poses update rig positions.
• for animation modification, in sequencer, once I’ve added an animation track, i can add the auto FK rig and set it to additive. with no baking, and it’s really clean and awesome. but for a custom control rig, I have to bake to it to the rig before i can modify things, is there a way I don’t know about to add a single control rig as an additive to an animation track without baking first?
• for sequencer animation authoring. if I want to build different rigs for different interaction models, vs 1 complex rig, is there a way to bake to a sequencer without exporting it to a file? or is the Dev thought process to just make a more complex single rig for in engine animation authoring.

• We would like to add the ability for Control Rig to get and modify assets like Pose Assets. It’s not there yet, but stay tuned.
• Unfortunately, not yet.
• You can “Bake Animation Sequence” which will generate an Animation Sequence Asset, Edit with FK Control Rig to generate keys, and Bake to Control Rig to generate keys for the Control Rig. These can all be used together to swap out rigs of differing complexity.

[Jeremiah3D (Jeremiah)]

@Hadley_Creations

I am just learning about the MetaHuman Creator.
On some items of my character, the shirt for example, there is the option to have a character that does not have a shirt. For this I can just select “None”.
This option is not there for the shoes.
Is there an alternative way to remove the shoes, as happens for other items when you select “None”?

This is a great question for the MetaHuman Creator team. You can find their community page linked here: MetaHuman - Unreal Engine

[Tina_Wisdom]

That’s all the time we have for today! Thank you all so much for coming by and asking questions from our awesome team, and of course a big thank you to Jeremiah, Kiaran, Paddy and Tom!!

Happy developing everyone!