Mix animation and control rig

Hello,

Unreal 5.3 newbie here, trying to make sense out of Metahuman, Anim-bp, and Control Rig.

Basically I want to mix some basic animations with some procedurally driven poses using IK. With metahuman I assumed that all those neat rigging controls with smoothing were all baked into control rig without the need to use ‘lookat’-functions on specific bones.

The problem is that either my control rig overrides the entirety of my animations, or the animations entirely override the control rig with seemly no inbetween. What am I missing here??


Base pose component, sitting as expected


Routed through the control rig, and suddenly all pose data is removed

Now I’ve tried different variations of the settings in advanced, and the closest to achieve my goals is setting the root bone as the sole “Output bones to transfer”, but now my control rig adds a weird offset and doesn’t add the extra gaze control I wanted in spine and head!


Adding the root bone to ‘Output bones to transfer’

I want to use these nice new systems, but so far it’s just driving me nuts! Seemingly every metahuman tutorial either just uses basic bone overrides, or just bakes out animations from the control rig. Am I trying to use the feature wrong?

The control rig itself should be the base one from a fresh metahuman. The anim-bp is the body one from metahuman that I’m trying to modify.

Hi SidewinderSteve,

Did you find any solutions for this ? I’m currently trying to animate a rider on a motorcycle. I’ve a lot of poses and would like to add them on top of the IK system.

I tried to blend between my animation and the control rig but I didnt get anything good so far.

Hi Mat,

I did find a somewhat “ugly” workaround by heavy use of stacked “Layerblend per bones”-nodes.

In each blend I manually added branch filters so so that the lower body is completely driven by control-rig, whilst arms are driven by one set of animations and torso drven by another.

Not really happy with the solution as It feels that I’m working against the tools rather than with them, but maybe it could help you.