UE5 Bones Creation for Control Rig

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello there,

Is anybody can help me to understand how to create my own skeleton for mesh for future creation of control rig to use it to animate a character in sequencer?

Thanks a lot!

2

Download Accurig and load in your model if it’s a human.

If it’s not a human watch a short youtube video and copy it exactly, repeat 5 times.

4

Speaking about non-humanoid, you mean creating bones manually? Or is there any autorig system for this?
I’m just interested in creating bones directly in engine (like virtual bones).

5

Hi,
I think it’s important separate discussion from creating bones for Control Rig and creating bones for Skeletal Mesh.

Bones in Control Rig do not depend on Skeleton asset, they can be imported from a Skeletal Mesh and create a weak reference to it, but once they are in, they are treated as separate set. It means they can be modified, renamed, restructured etc. and it won’t affect the original Skeleton asset or Skeletal Mesh from which they were imported from. (other than Control Rig may stop working on Skeletal Meshes using that Skeleton because hierarchy wouldn’t match).

As far as I know, in unmodified UE5 there is no way to add normal bones to Skeletal Mesh. Virtual Bones act a bit differently and do not support many features that normal bones do. It also seem not possible to remove bones from SkeletalMesh asset for good, but removing them from a LOD level is possible. (effectively removing the bone and moving all weights of it on vertices to other weighted bones)

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

6

Thanks a lot for you answer. Yes, I talk about a way to create Skeleton for an asset in UE so the skin weights would work (like we creating chains with joints in Maya/Max to later import for UE for animations). I’m just looking for info, is it possible to work with bones for skeletal mesh as we do in Maya or not, because there’s a beta-plugin for some sort of skinning. Thanks a lot for your answer!

7

Found something called akeytsu, has built in support for UE4 (works with UE5)
Just need to rename the root file to root or UE5 Won’t register it as the root.

Supports humans
Very easy setup for custom that auto links bones
Automatically makes rigging controls for animation
Has skin weight painting

free (trial)

8

Thank you so much