I completely agree. I’ve been confused by this myself for many years. I actually came up with my own IK setup that works for me, and wish I could understand epic’s setup better so I can use the standard thing everyone else uses. Or maybe I’ll once and for all be comfortable knowing that I can’t use epic’s setup for my game due to my way of doing things.
Oh and don’t even get me started on how confused I am by the new corrective pose bones that come with the UE5 mannequin. I understand now it’s because it’s based on metahumans and that may be the way going forward. However my game is also going to have non-human monsters. How do I decide what bones and corrective poses to use for my monsters. Some of those poses are very random. There was one that had the character’s thigh twist by 10 degrees and was not even noticeable. My previous plan was to just reuse the mannequin skeleton hierarchy and add/remove unneeded spine and other bones. Now I’m super confused with all the extra
bones.
I even forgot I asked this question years earlier:
I’ve been struggling along with ART 1 for the last few years myself, and have even used it with Maya 2020. I also tried ART V2. I used to make my own rig actually, but it was incredibly difficult to animate weapon reload animations so ART helped with space switching. ART messes up the maya environment somehow and I often have to reset my settings. It also requires Z up instead of the normal up, so all my models I built in the past were hard to open.
I’m actually excited about the new control rig in unreal and plan on no longer using maya to do animations at all. I just need a good environment to make weapon reloading animations and have good space switching, which unreal will make much easier. The rest is probably going to be mocap cleanup using maya’s own tools so I no longer need ART.
It took quite a lot of digging around, but I realized the standard control rig to use is the metahuman rig. The manny and quinn mannequins are based on metahuman, and their control rig is copied straight from that. The valley of the ancients demo also has that “ancient” robot, and it too is based on a metahuman character. Its control rig is copied from that. I started making my own control rig for the old UE4 skeleton, and was using the ancient rig as a reference. Then I heard metahumans come with a control rig so I imported one of those into my project. I was going to use that as a reference for how to build a rig instead, and it turned out it was identical. Then realized, oh, I should really just use the new UE5 mannequins and their control rigs from now on. Maybe ignore all those corrective pose bones too, since manny/quinn come with simplified models that don’t use the corrective bones either. Maybe my human marine character will use the new metahuman skeleton and all the corrective bones, but my monsters will be simpler. Probably for the best since I want many of them to exist on screen at once for you to slaughter. And painting all those weights is going to be a nightmare, but the results will be really nice if done right.