Hello guys, and welcome
back to another video. In this video, we're going to be
checking out the new Modular Control Rig creator inside of Unreal Engine 5. 4. The Modular Control Rig is a
brand new system that allows you to create a robust animation rig
for any character or skeleton. very quickly and efficiently. It allows you to drag and drop presetted
controls onto your character so you have things like the arms, legs,
fingers, and spine to choose from. And once you drag and drop it, it
automatically creates the rigs and gizmos needed to start animating
your character in Unreal Engine. This new modular control rig workflow
enables you to not have to manually and meticulously create a control rig from
scratch, but rather it automates the process of creating a animation rig. To just a couple of clicks, whether you
are interested in creating animations in engine for your games or animating
your digital characters or things like creating short films and virtual
production, a new modular control rig will speed up your workflow, allowing you
to create animation ready control rigs. Now, before we dive into the video,
check out my courses on smartpoly. teachable. com. If you are interested in making games
inside of Unreal Engine, luckily for you, I have a complete multiplayer
survival game course, which shows you step by step how to create a multiplayer
survival game inside of Unreal Engine. I'm going to be remastering
this course in Unreal Engine 4. 5. 4 and adding some new features in the
course like controller input support first and third person mode and so
much more So if you haven't picked the course up yet I highly recommend
you do as I will be remastering it when they release on launch in 5. 4 and with all that out of the way,
let's get right into the video So to get started you want to make sure
that you First have unreligion 5. 4 installed. Currently I have the 5. 4 preview one version. This is sort of like the beta version
and you want to make sure that you have the control rig modules plugin enabled. So go ahead and go up to edit and plugins. And you want to search for control
rig and just make sure that you have this control ring modules enabled. So go ahead and hit that check box if it
isn't enabled and restart your project. It is currently enabled by default. Also, you'll notice that it
is a experimental plugin. So it is subject to
any changes or updates. So now that we have the plugin enabled,
I'm going to add a custom character to demonstrate how easy it is to
create a modular control rig for it. I'll be using this free pirate character. So you're going to search this up. On the marketplace, add it to your project
and search up the project, select it, choose the latest compatible version. In this case, it's 5. 3. And just click add to project. You can really try this with
any character that you want. So just note, you don't have to follow
exactly along and really try this with any humanoid character, and even it
doesn't have to be a human type character. And we'll see that later on in the video. All right. So now that we have that pirate
character, or at least a character that we can use, let's create
the modular control rig asset. So to create this asset, you just want
to right click in your content browser and go over to the animation tab. And all the way down to control
rig, we just want to add a normal control rig asset. So go ahead and select that. Then a menu is going to pop up
and you're going to see that you have two different options. So first we have the control rig option. This is what you'd use if you wanted
to manually create a control rig. I have a full video detailing that
process and how to create a control rig. But in our case, we want to select
this modular rig and let's go ahead and click create on that. And then we can just rename
this to pirate rig and just double click and open that up. Now the first time you open
this up, you're going to see a bunch of new windows. So the first of which is this
compiler results or whatever reason this window just pops up. I mean, just close that. We don't actually need that. Now your first time inside of this
UI or inside the modular control rig window, I'm going to explain all the
user interface that you see here and just note that things might move around or be
updated in newer versions of the engine. But first of all, we have air, the
module assets, these are the different preset of options that we get. We'll come back to all this in a second,
have things like the hierarchy, so this will show us sort of like the bone
hierarchy of our modules in the center. Here we have things like the viewport,
I have your standard viewport control. So you can look around,
move around all that stuff. And then over here on the
right, we have things like the details, preview scene settings. And the rig hierarchy. So the very first thing that we need
to do is select our character that we'll be creating the rig for our case. We want to go to preview scene
settings and under the preview mesh, you want to hit the drop down. And since I've added that pirate
character, I'm going to select this SK pirates, underscore full. Underscore zero one. That will add in our pirate mesh. And again, you can use this
for any character that you want to try this out with. So now that we have this pirate
character added here in our rig, the very first thing that you can see is we
have a basic control for the movement of our character and to select the
controls, you can just left click on it and we'll give you a little gizmo. And then if you hover over
this, these little sockets are going to tell you exactly what
you need to drag and drop onto. So if you hover over
this, it's going to say. The name of that socket spine
01 socket, and it says drag and drop the spine module here. So if we look over in our
module assets, if we scroll down, we have this spine asset. And actually let's go ahead and
make this a little bit larger. So you guys can see that we
hit this little, uh, gizmo icon right here, the gear icon. We can show this as tiles, and then
we can also hit the gear icon and. Make the thumbnail size medium, that way
you guys can see all of the different modules that we have to work with. So, it wants us to drag and
drop the spine module here. So if we go into our module
assets, we have this spine module. We just drag and drop this, and
it'll automatically add that control. And also in the module hierarchy, you'll
see that it automatically finds the bones. So we have the pelvis bone, you can
see that it assigned the pelvis bone, the spine end bone, and the spine start
bone are automatically assigned, and this is because the bones were all named
properly, and so it'll automatically find the end and start bone based
on the names of those bones, okay? And now you can see it added this
little control for our spine or for our hips, and it also added
more of these different sockets. So if you hover over these
different sockets, you can see what we need to add next. So if I hover over this shoulder L socket,
it says, place the shoulder module here. So if we go back into our module folder,
we can select our shoulder module and just drag and drop it on there. And now you can see it adds this shoulder
control right above the left shoulder. Again, let's take our shoulder
module and drag it on the shoulder R. And we'll add the right shoulder control. And a very nice thing about this
is that it color codes this. So it adds blue left and right. Red for the right and then down here
if we hover over this the hand L socket it says place the arm module here So
let's go ahead and take the arm module and drag and drop it like so and I
can see it adds in these arm Controls so I can select this arm right here. I can press e to rotate I can select this
part of the arm and rotate it like so and if you want to reset it You just hit the
compile button right here, and I will go ahead and reset Any movements or rotations
that you do to the character's skeleton. So as you can see, we're starting to add
controls to our character by just dragging and dropping these modules onto the
different sockets that it tells us to add. So let's go ahead and
add the right arm module. So take the arm and drag it and
drop it on the right hand socket. I'll go ahead and add those
controls for our right arm. Then down here, it says I L socket. So we want to place the leg module here. Let's go ahead and take the leg
module and drag and drop it there. It looks like it didn't add it. So let's go ahead and
redo that bag and drop it. It actually did add it. So if you scroll in the module hierarchy,
sometimes if it has trouble assigning proper bones, you're going to see that. Here are the modules added. So you can see there are currently no
bones assigned, so highlighted red, none. So we can go ahead and delete that
module, select it and delete it. And let's go ahead and try re
adding it again, drag the leg and drop it on the thigh L. And if we scroll down, you can see
that it properly assigned everything. So we have the leg, the thigh bone,
this assign a thigh L, the pelvis, the foot bone and all that stuff. And if we actually go down
here, we have this foot control. So if I select it and press W, I can
move the leg, and you can see that we have IK already set up on it. So I can start moving the foot up
and down, and basically it'll set up IK for our character's leg. Very neat that it allows us to do that. Let's go ahead and set up the right leg. So let's take the other leg. Like module and drag or drop it on there. And again, it adds another control. And also if we were to take
things like the hip control right here, you can see that the IK is
properly working for the legs. I can pose it up and down like,
so, and our characters joints are all moving like that. Hey, these pull controls are a little
bit far out and I believe you can manually adjust things like the offset. And the details, but for
now, this will do fine. Now there's other different
controls that we can add. So if you hover closer, we have
things like controls for the fingers. So for things like the fingers, we have
a finger module, just drag and drop it on various different fingers like so, and
it will add in controls for our fingers. Let's go ahead and drag all of these. You can see that it's starting to add
controls, just drag and drop these. Okay, so that one failed to assign,
so let's go ahead and delete that. Try and redrag and drop it. That's good, and there we go. So now we have controls for our
fingers, so we can select these. You can see that it allows
us to rotate things like the finger bones and all that stuff. So we can go ahead and do
that for the right hand. We also have things like the head. So if you hover over the head, it
says place the neck module here. So we have a neck module, just
drag and drop it right there. And that will add in a head control. So you could select that. You could do things like rotate the head. So let's say we're all done with this rig. Now that we've created this very simple
module rig with just a couple of drag and drop clicks, we are now ready to
start using this rig to either animate it in the engine, create animations for
your games, or we can create things like a sequence if we wanted to create some
sort of short film, or if we want to use it for things like virtual production. So to start using this rig, all you
have to do is drag in this modular rig into your level, and you're going
to see that it automatically pops up. Open with the animation mode. So it'll put us into the animation
mode, just like if you were to drag in a normal control rig. So if you are familiar with
using a normal control rigs, it's essentially the same process. If I close my content browser here, I
can go and zoom up on our character. So we can actually start animating
into the engine by just dragging and dropping this modular control rig. So for example, if I were
to take something like the. If control, I can go into the sequence
or the timeline and add a key so I can select the body control and click on this
little icon to add a key, move it halfway on the timeline, move our character down. Let's turn off the snapping. We don't need snapping there. So just disable the snapping. So it gives us a smooth location. You can see, we can move our character
down and our feet have that IK. So we can move him down like this,
like he's sitting down in a chair. And now you can see, we have a
very simple animation playing. If you just press space bar, you
can play through the animation. So you can very easily start animating
your character and rotating controls and create whatever animation you
want to create for your character. Whether that be for games. Or for short films or virtual production. And the very neat thing about
this is that the process was very quick, very streamlined,
especially compared to creating a control rig manually from scratch. Creating something like this from
scratch would take, you know, well over an hour, creating all the gizmos and
assigning them to all the different bones. But now with the modular
control rig, it's a lot easier. It's just dragging and dropping. Certain modules that are presetted onto
the different sockets and allowing it to automatically assign the different
controls based on the names of your bones. And the neat thing about the
module control rig is that there are other different modules or
things other than characters. For example, we have this. chain module. So if you hover over any of these,
you'll probably notice that you can see exactly what these modules are used for. So it has a little description that
says creates a chain rig can be FK or IK base and includes optional dynamics. Well, this works better when the target
bone chain is straight, but not required. So you can add a chain for Maybe
like a tail on a creature, really any type of chain of bones. Also, we have this piston module. So this as a piston rig with
bidirectional and constraints can also be used as an aim mechanism. So you can see that we have these other
different controls that you can use for. Things that are not necessarily a
character model, and these are just all of the preset controls that it currently
comes with, but obviously they're going to be adding a lot more, and I haven't
tested out trying to rig a quadruped character like a animal or something like
that, but I'm sure you probably could use some of these different controls to do so. And also in the future, I'm
certain they're going to be allowing support and more different
modules for doing just that. So yeah, that is the module
control rig inside of unreligion. 5. 4. This is still experimental,
which means that they can change or update things like the UI. It might add more futures and it's
still very early in development. So I expect them to add a lot more
flexibility and future modules. In my honest opinion, I think this is
a great tool because it saves you a lot of time in creating a control rig. To animate your character
with just a couple of clicks. Whereas before you'd have to
create one from complete scratch. And it might take you over
an hour or two to do so. Now let me know what you guys think
down in the comments down below. Is this something that makes
you want to get into animating characters in Unreal Engine? Now that the process for rigging
is something more streamlined. Let me know what you guys think. And smartpoly. teachable. com you And yeah, that's
pretty much it for this video. So I hope you guys enjoyed and
I'll see you guys in the next one.
