Procedural animation

Hi

I am a 3D modeling and animation student without any game dev background, trying to learn to make the following task:

What I want to create is an industrial robot arm that I “procedurally” animate during runtime and has a Control Rig for manually animating for sequences where that is needed.

How I imagine it would work is something like:

[Gif example][2]

BP_MovableObject:

Object the robot arm is supposed to pick up

Socket the arm aims for when grabbing

BP_RobotArm:

Rest pose

When BP_MovableObject enters area

Move IK_Ctrl to Location_A

Attach BP_MovableObject to IK_Ctrl

Move IK_Ctrl to Location_B

Detach BP_MovableObject to IK_Ctrl

Back to rest pose

BP_Spline:

Moves BP_MovableObject to/from BP_RobotArm

Here is the robot arm I’m using:

bone hierarchy in Blender

bone hierarchy in UE4

What I tried so far:

Play around with the recently introduced control rig system in both version 4.25 and 4.26.

After some trial and error and following a few tutorial I managed scrap from the internet, I made a basic setup with a full-body IK control rig:

FBIK control rig

animating in sequencer

With this setup, I can make some basic animation using the sequencer, but not exactly what I wanted.

My next step was to look into how BP and Anim Bp classes work in Unreal.

I’ve tried to learn how to trigger a baked animation sequence making a collision overlap event BP: [GIF][7]

I’ve tried to recreate Inu Game’s procedural robot arm example that I found on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/games_inu/status/1318271501578141698][8]

[version 1][9]

[version 2][10]

Somewhat in the right direction, but not exactly a fully working result. But at least learning a bit.

Using his tweets as a reference. It helped to understand how I can make the control rig communicate with the animation BP and BP class.

But as I’ve got very limited experience working this way, I don’t really know which steps to take and in what direction to go. Or if it’s really possible to achieve it this way. So would love it if anyone could help guide/point me in the correct direction for how to solve this.

Update:

I keep on iterating. In this version, I managed to get the robot to follow the sphere.

[GIF][1]

On run time, I can move the sphere and the robot follows. Some joints still look tilted and not perfectly aligned but I haven’t figured out how to fix that yet.

Next, I will try to make the robot to move its arm to a defined location.

The control rig

anim Bp

anim bp events

Bp class