Tutorial: How to Create a Dynamic Chain using Control Rig

The Dragon featured in the Forest Guardian experience was fully rigged and animated in UEFN. To create organic flying animation, a special rig was built in Control Rig utilizing a Dynamic Chain. This basic tutorial will show you how to create that same dynamic chain rig.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/6BYP/unreal-engine-fortnite-how-to-create-a-dynamic-chain-using-control-rig

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Hi, I was trying to follow the tutorial but when I copy the code snippets and try to paste them into my Rig graph, it crashes the editor. I’m using UE 5.0, does it only work with 5.1 or later?

Correct this only works in UE 5.1 and above.

Hi, thank you for the tutorial, its really great, but i am struggling with bones stretching and I cannot find where the problem is. Is there some easy way to turn off bones stretching?
Thank you for your answer.

Hi, I am new to learning in Unreal Engine and just becoming familiar with Blueprints. I downloaded the Forest Guardian rig from the Unreal Marketplace and I did the tutorial. I found it very easy to follow the tutorial but I cant claim to understand exaclty what it is I am doing. I made the bone chain and used it to make the Dragon move like a snake. Now I am experimenting with the idea of using my player character to ride around on the Dragon with the procedural animations in-game rather than using the rig to capture conventional animations. I could do it with physics I suppose but considering the byte code is so fast as it says in the tutorial I would really like to try and use the spring method from the tutorial directly.
Any clues?

I learned a lot by watching your video on demystifying Control Rig from last year’s UnrealFest.
Im experimenting with getting the Forest Guardian Rig to respond to controls in a naturalistic way so the movement of the Dragon body fits in with the translation of the mesh as it respond to the keypresses and mouse movement. Please can you give some screenshots of your modifications to the third person character Blueprint with more details they are very small in the video?
It would be a great help.

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sir,how can i use this dragon in Animation Blueprint? I want it to move along the spline ,I sent the location of the scene to headglobal control,But its position always has the problem of deflection and rotation

I wrote a simple tutorial. Please refer to it if you like. There are many parts that I don’t understand. Please let me know if you find out anything.

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Great work syui, please tell what are the bits you don’t understand?

I was just thinking maybe a combination of the spring interp node and the spline method that is shown in the content examples under Blueprint_splines might work, I will try experimenting with it when I have more time.

Otherwise it just means using the blueprint to add the timed extra movements that are needed so the player can get on with the flying.

Hey thanks syui I will give this a go.
I first tried just a simple bone chain skinned onto the basic Dragon mesh which worked quite well but not perfect.

Currently I am just trying to adapt this tutorial I found on Youtube from Ryan Laley from a different Dragon which gives basic flight characteristics similar to the World of Warcraft Dragon riding. It adds momentum when diving and reduced speed when climbing plus a couple of different speed boosts. This time I used the full Chase Cooper Rig and it seems to be working ok so far.

One of my colleagues suggested using a null actor like a box or something as the main controller for the flying direction and such and then parenting the Dragon head to that to get the flight charactersitics of the Chinese Loong Dragon using the spring interp node, I havent tried it because I am doing another project but I will take another look into this.
If you look at the whiskers they respond to the direction changes of the main body, a bit like any sort of automatic secondary animation, like the little Stack-o-bot antennae example Chase Cooper shows at the end of the same tuorial as the Dragon interp one.
Keep in touch.

Hi Steve TNT,
If you want to use a spline there’s a fish in the content examples that does this:

https://www.fab.com/listings/4d251261-d98c-48e2-baee-8f4e47c67091

Load the level Blueprint_Splines

dragon ik plugin is creating a new tutorial. I tried it and this one was easier to implement.

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Wow this looks very interesting, I will have a go at it and report back.
:heart_eyes:

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