Character rigs with controllers?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’m building a third person character and have created a skeleton, I’ve brought it into the engine and tested retargeting and other aspects of the animation pipeline. One thing that’s been bothering me though is that I can’t seem to find any signs that controllers can be used for our characters. By controllers, I mean the splines used in a 3D program to help with animation and in many cases, make up part of the rig. The closest thing to a controller or control curve I can find in the mannequin is a few IK nodes.

Can we use controllers/control curves in our characters, or do we have to animate using just the bones? Does this mean complex rigs involving the use of splines and path constraints aren’t usable?

I don’t want to have the animators working with a rig that we can’t use, so until I can find an answer for this one I’m stuck.

2

Hi A Space Ostrich,

You can totally use rigs with your characters. For clarification, though, rigs are control structures that will be built for the skeleton/skinned mesh in your artists’ DCC package (Maya, Max, Blender, etc.), they will do the animation process in that software, then export the animation as an FBX for import into UE4. While there is some basic support for making simple animations in the engine itself, I would not recommend it as the main means of animating.

3

Thanks. I was worried that the splines would mess with the skeleton hierarchy on the import, but while I’ve not had a chance to test it properly a quick import seemed to work without breaking, the fact that the mannequin didn’t have any threw me off.