Controlling movements on a crane. Up-Down + Rotation


Looking for tips on how to add controls to a crane. I need to be able to control the individual parts separately.

I’ve tried to adding the different parts as individual Blueprints and use Timeline in the Event Graph to rotate them (+Relative Rotation). And then add those into another Blueprint with the correct hierarchy. That kind of work, but I can’t figure out how to make it rotate in the opposite direction. For example I can rotate back and forth from 0° to 90°, but I want to be able to rotate from 0° to -90° as well. Is there any way to fix that?

Another solution I’ve tried is rigging in Control Rig and create animations. But that way it just plays the animations I’ve created and I can’t really control and stop the different parts. Is there a way to combine the different animations and make them stop and reverse? In my mind the best solution would probably be to be able to use inputs from Keyboard Events to rotate the controllers in Control Rig, but I’m not sure if that’s possible.

Any advice on how I can control cranes, excavator arms, etc. in Unreal Engine? Any tips, ideas and tutorials that might send me in the right direction will be greatly appreciated.