Hello, I am making a prototype with Unreal and I was very satisfied with everything until I reached the point of adding animations.
Are control rigs mandatory to make animations? I can’t make a control rig. I have two problems, when I add the controls, the spheres are very big and they do not coincide with the bones.
Another problem I have is that the tutorials all use a specific blueprint node that doesn’t appear for me at all.
I am confused as to why I need a control rig, I can move the bones correctly when I access the skeleton or the skeleton mesh.
Hi there! I hope I’ll be able to clear some things up about bones and control rigs for you.
Models that need moving parts in their animations need bones. Each bone has an offset that it rotates around and a part of the model that it will turn alive. Once you add all the necessary bones to your model, the combination of those create the skeletal mesh of your model. You can then manipulate these bones in a 3D editor such as Blender, or whatever you used to create your model, and create animations for your models.
Control rigs on the other hand, need bones to control in the first place. They can be used to manipulate the bones just like how you do in a 3D editor.
You can indeed use control rigs to animate your models inside Unreal Engine, and bake those animations using sequencers. But it is definetly not a practical way of crearing intricate animations. You can have much better control of your bones using a 3D editor since it is better designed for this purpose, and can help you create more natural animations that would be significantly harder to achieve using control rigs. The best use case of control rigs are actually having a dynamic control on models’s bones during gameplay, one example could be having the model’s feet aligned with the ground. Since you can’t have hundreds of animations for every angle and the combination of the two feet, you can use control rigs to adjust whatever animation is being played at the moment to achieve the desired objective.
Hopefully this helps you have a better understanding on animations
