Tutorial: Animating in Engine Tutorial: How to make a Character Picker

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
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A tutorial to show how to use Editor Utility Widgets to create a Character Picker for animating a Control Rig in Sequencer.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/7qpa/unreal-engine-animating-in-engine-tutorial-how-to-make-a-character-picker

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Hey Greg, this is a great tutorial! Thank you for that!

I have a couple of following questions:

-You introduced a clear selection node to get rid of the SHIFT functionality which is great, awesome! However, what happens if sometimes we do want to have that shift functionality? If for eg. I want to select head + neck + arm to delete the animation from those controls. It’s not really practical to have gazilion selection sets (like you would have for the fingers) every time you want to select multiple controls.

-When I download the latest MetaHuman Project from the Epic store, the picker you are showing in the video is not there. Any idea where can I find it?

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Hey Lynn, thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed the tutorial. FYI - I re-recorded the video since yesterday with a few extra pointers.

For the Shift functionality, you can actually have the EUW listen for the Shift key. You would want to override the On Key Down event and see if the Shift Key was down.

For the Metahuman Picker, you can get it through the Metahuman Creator as well.

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cool vid Greg!
do you know if it’s possible with blueprints to manipulate the keys in sequencer? like if I wanted to make like an animbot control, animBot , if so is there any example editor utility widgets I could look at?

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Hey Greg, I found the MetaHuman picker. It only lives in Unreal 4.26, and I was using 5.0.3, so that’s why I didn’t see it. And I managed to create shift functionality (with the help of a Unreal TD though).

Would it be too much to ask for a blueprint snapshot or a video on setting up ik/fk switching and toggling of controls? Node network in MetaHuman picker is really difficult to understand and reverse engineer.

I really appreciate all your help so far! Being an animator, coming from Maya, all of this is really nuclear physics :smiley:

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Hey YuuJin,

You absolutely can. I would check out our documentation on Sequencer scripting and our examples in the engine build: …\Engine\Plugins\MovieScene\SequencerScripting\Content\Python

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Hey Lynn,

The picker will appear in your UE5 project as a part of the common folder if you download the Metahuman into your project via Quixel Bridge. MetaHumans in Quixel Bridge | MetaHuman Creator Documentation

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I’m relatively new to Unreal Engine, so forgive me if I don’t know what I’m talking about, but is it necessary to hardcode the bone name in the blueprint? And presumably need to edit that for every skeleton you import?

Wouldn’t it be better to put an editable textbox in the form? Or if possible, a dropdown or list with all bone names, so you can choose one? Or maybe a button that uses the currently selected bone?

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Hey KWS,

That is all good! I had hardcoded the control name in the blueprint just to illustrate the point further.

You are correct in the sense that you would need to edit the picker for every Control Rig that you would use. If you have different skeletons, but the same Control names in each of the Control RIgs, then it would work fine.

Another way is to go with the select sets I mention with the Control Rig Pose Library, where you could query the controls.

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This doesn’t seem to work with the new modular rigs.