Hi there!
I’ve been jumping on and off from UE for the past year, I’m mainly a Blender/Maya user, but recently I wanted to push myself toward UE for some filmmaking needs.
I’m building a modular prop for a light stand. The idea is to have it modular, so that different types of lamps and softboxes/diffusions can be swapped on the fly, and to have the light rigged so that I can control the height, the angle and the intensity of the lamp on the stand. I tried looking for tutorials or specific answers, with very few success, I had to adapt a lot from other rigs and workarounds. So far I’ve fought for a few days between SkelMeshes, Control Rigs and Blueprints, and I’ve got somewhere near the desired result.
So basically I’ve rigged and weight painted the basic light rig mesh, and then I’ve made a ControlRig for the Skeletal Mesh so that I have 1 controller for the root transform, 1 for the height of the stand, and the last 1 for the angle of the lamp.
After that, I’ve exported the SkelMesh from UE to Blender, where I’ve copied the same weight painting to different lamps and diffusions and assigned them to the UE skeleton, then exported each module of the rig with the same skeleton.
On the UE importer, I’ve assigned the original skeleton rigged and WP on UE for each fbx module I’ve exported from Blender, and it worked, no issues on Import for missing bones or weird hierarchy.
Then I proceeded building a Blueprint for the modular prop, and it worked, I’m able to switch for different lamps and diffusions, so far so good. Then I tried linking the Blueprint with the Control Rig I’ve created before. I’ve followed and adapted some tutorials on this, so I had to fiddle a bit, but seemed to work without crashing or errors when compiling the code, but I couldn’t see the actual controls of the control rig anywhere.
When importing the BP in the scene, and even when adding a track on the sequencer for the BP, the controls for the ControlRig cannot be seen anywhere. If I import the ControlRig directly in the scene and add a track to the sequencer, they show on the control rig component. At the same time, I can see that the Blueprint components do actually have the control rig, and if I tweak them from the Sequencer, they work as they are supposed to, but still nowhere to be seen.
Lastly, whenever I try to add an actual spot light to the blueprint, so that the prop actually emits light, I cannot find a way to attach it to the head/lamp bone so that the spotlight follows the lamp orientation and height. On the ControlRig, I’ve managed to attach a light easily to the corresponding bone, but I cannot find a way on the modular BP.
So I’ve multiple issues here:
- The Blueprints behave a bit glitchy when imported and posed in the scene, sometime they glitch back to the default position, and if I tweak a bit the controllers, they glitch back to the pose.
- I can swap lamps in the skeletal mesh blueprint without issues, but whenever I try to have no lamps (so only the light stand, which option I’d like to have) UE freezes and crashes.
- I’d like the controls of the ControlRig to show on the Blueprint components as well, actually if possible I’d like to be always able to see the controls without having to go to the sequencer, so I can just drag and drop the BP and pose it in my scene from selection mode.
- I would like to have an actual spot light with the Blueprint. I’ve tried the Emissive Material way but it does not behave as I’d like to, specially when adding diffusion or a soft box to the light. Best thing would be to have the light coming with each lamp, because they vary in size. So I’m thinking maybe a Blueprint inside a blueprint? So I can make a BP for each individual lamp, with the spotlight in the correct position, and then swap the BPs for the different lamps, as I am now swapping between Skeletal Meshes. The spotlight should be then bound to the same ControlRig as the lamp, so it would follow height and direction accordingly.
- Supposing that with your help I manage to fix all of these problems, I’d like to somewhat retain the Details for each spotlight generated with the BP, so that when placing the BP in the scene, I can always access all the possible tweaks to adjust each light temperature, intensity, cone angle, texture, etc…
I know it’s a lot, and you’re a hero just for reading all of this, but I have the feeling that the solutions are quite easy to implement.
Thank you!