UE5.8 Modular control rig can not be exposed in Bake to Control rig feature

General Issues and Bug Reporting (Unreal Engine)
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Summary

Modular rigs created in 5.8 version are not exposed for baking existing animations on them. The modular rigs imported from previous versions are working. The manually created control rigs are getting exposed after the backward solver is added. But no module fixes the exposure of the modular rig type.

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

Animation

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create a modular rig in UE5.8 with any desired modules
  2. Try to bake an animation to it

Expected Result

The feature is still accessible by modular control rigs created in previous versions.

Observed Result

All modular rigs with new modules are simply invisible for the Baking.

Affects Versions

5.8

Platform(s)

Windows

1 Like
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UE-386507 has been ‘Closed’. We’re unable to reproduce this issue.

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To reproduce the issue, follow these steps:

  1. Download the Game Animation Sample project and open it in Unreal Engine 5.8.1.
  2. Take the SKM_Manny_Simple skeletal mesh (for example) and create a new Control Rig from it.
  3. Open any animation, for example Manny_calf_l_anim.
  4. Go to Edit in Sequencer → Bake to Control Rig.

You’ll notice that the newly created Control Rig does not appear in the list of available Control Rigs.

If you follow the exact same steps in an earlier version, such as Unreal Engine 5.6, the newly created Control Rigs do appear and can be selected for baking.

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For anyone hitting this in 5.8 — I found a workaround:

Modular Control Rigs created in 5.8 don’t show up in the “Bake to Control Rig” list (or bake with broken/garbage results even when you disable “Filter Asset by Skeleton”). This is the bug described above.

What worked for me: don’t use Bake to Control Rig at all. Instead, add the modular Control Rig directly to the Skeletal Mesh track in Sequencer, then right-click the Control Rig track and tick “Convert to Layered.”

Steps:

In Sequencer, add your modular Control Rig to the Skeletal Mesh track (+ / right-click → your Control Rig).

Right-click the Control Rig track in Sequencer.

In the menu, check “Convert to Layered.”

Once it’s layered, the rig composites on top of the existing animation instead of going through the broken bake path — the original animation stays intact and you can edit it with your own custom controls (IK included), not just FK.

Note: it’s a checkbox in the track’s right-click menu, not a separate “bake” dialog. That’s the part that isn’t obvious.

Hope this saves someone the hours I spent on it.