How to use control rig with arbitrary skeletons?

I’m thinking of making a control rig that does something on a few bones in my character. I’d like to reuse this control rig on arbitrary skeletons by allowing some input parameters like bone names. This is kindof how you’d expect something like the TwoBoneIK skeletal control to work.

In control rig you normally need a bone hierarchy set up, but different characters might have different hierarchies with different bone names, so that part makes it a bit hard to have it be reusable.

Hello,

There are good references about control rig for custom character, perhaps these videos will help you.

How To SetUp Control Rig In Unreal Engine - YouTube

Unreal Engine 5 (&4): Build a Control Rig from scratch. #UE5 #UnrealEngine #ControlRig - YouTube

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My question is more along the lines of how to make a single universal control rig, if that’s possible. The way I see it done now is you have to duplicate control rigs if there are bone name changes.

Like I’m thinking of making a rig that just adjust two bones related to my character’s foot.

In one character it might be named ik_foot_l, ik_foot_r. In another it may be named VB ik_foot_l, VB ik_foot_r since I’m using virtual bones instead.

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I actually ended up finding a bug in the engine and fixing it: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/9481

I’m not going to be afraid of using sub anim graphs now so maybe I don’t have to do some kind of universal control rig either.

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this is a series of vids on it

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Oh interesting. I’ve seen this video pop up a lot on my feed but haven’t fully watched it yet. I was worried it was outdated.

he explains how to use it with non humanoid skeletons

I haven’t watched it yet, but does he explain how to use it with any skeleton once you build it for one skeleton?

It’s not that I have trouble with non-humanoids. It’s just the bone names seem like a hardcoded thing so if you try to run a control rig on a totally different skeleton with different bone names, that’s the part I’m confused on.

that’s when you need to retarget so bones are mapped to the right other bone
or rename your skel bones