Power IK: Intro to Control Rig 1/2

hello my name is Kieran Richie and welcome to the power I can't roll rig introductory tutorial so first of all you may be wondering what is control rig it's a brand new experimental plug-in supplied by epic for doing interactive animation rigs directly in the editor so this is what's normally the types of rigs that are normally reserved for your offline content creation tools like blender or Maya it's now possible to create those rigs rating unreal and further more power I can now supports it as well so you can use control rig to create animation rigs that utilize the power right K solver so I'm going to show you how that looks and what it's good for so first of all you will find the control rig plug-in under built-in search for control rig and it's described as a framework for animation driven by user controls slightly misleading it's actually so while yes you can create user driven animation rigs well what really excites me about control rig is the ability to then take that rig and package it up as a node and embed that right in your animgraph so it becomes an anima graph node that can apply procedural modifications to your pose at runtime in your game so it's it's more than just a sort of keyframe animation tool but it's also sort of a full suite of dynamic procedural modifications that you can make to your rig so let me show you first of all a sample of what that looks like running on the spider here so I'm gonna stop this going to our spider spider control rig so you can download this sample project directly from the link on the store page and in here you'll find the spider control rig so if we pop that open you have a familiar viewport and the top left here down here you have a rig hierarchy view this is very important and over here is your rig graph so I'll kind of go through at a high how this works but first let's take a look at the results so you can go ahead and grab these controls I've got a control on each of his feet and you can just move those around and you can see where we're running the full power a case over here which is how the full body is reacting to these IQ effectors I'm using a feature of control rig called the relay know to get some some dynamic kind of bobbing going on here and we actually have a layered setup here that allows you to post the character with just the feet and then additively move the thorax so you still have control over the thorax and this is something that is actually really hard to accomplish even in dedicated animation software like Maya or blender this kind of layered dynamic control but unreal control rig system makes this totally possible and with power ika you can make really sophisticated I case setups that affect the entire body so you can see here how a normal like a set up moving feed effectors does not move the rest of the body but here we have kind of a nice full body effect so let's take a look at how that works control rig and unreal is built on the paradigm of a stack of executions that happened one after another so unlike what you might be familiar with in Maya and other programs there isn't sort of a an implicit dependency graph evaluation that's going on here you really do have to say exactly what steps you will want to execute and what order so it starts at this begin execute node and the first thing we do is just set the root bone location and it's very important to check on this propagate to children so what I'm gonna actually just break this connection so all our rig does now is take this route control transform and set the root bone transform while propagating that to all the children so I'll compile that we'll grab our route control which you can see here in the rig hierarchy view and I'm just gonna kind of move that around so you can see how that's moving the whole spider and we've created our very first sort of base animation rig now if I connect that into our power I case Oliver and to the rest of the rig you can see now that power Ike is taking over and starting to move those hips around and all the feet okay at any point while you're making a controller you can hit compile it'll reset the state to the to the starting point so that's really handy it also dynamically recompiles if you have Auto compiled turned on which allows you to kinda noodle around on the graph connect and disconnect things and I found that it's actually very stable very efficient way to develop rigs so let's just go through at a high level here and take a look at the entirety of this rig all of the features and at the very end there will we'll just kind of go through the setup process so you can see how to get started making these things on your own so what I've got here is a thorax control that you can translate and rotate there's a control on the head that you can rotate you can get in here and grab those fangs and rotate those individually there's a rotation control on the abdomen and each foot has its own effector as well as control for the entire rig okay compiled to reset it and let's go through the rickrack so as we already saw we're first setting the route then we go through and we get the transforms of all of these foot controls so these red and blue boxes that you see at the bottom here these are our foot controls and I'm using this get control transform node specifying the name of the control getting that just the position and I'm pumping that into effectors on a power a case solver with the solver set up to have the character route set to the thorax and then each of these affect our controls running through with the bone set to the tip bone so these are the bones at the tip of all the legs so I believe I have here one effector for each foot so this is just this is driving all of the the foot positions and then letting power I cake and of manage the rest of the body so if we actually just disconnect the rig at this point and play it you'll see that what we're getting is the feet kind of pushing the whole body around but you notice that that thorax control is no longer following so it was at a later stage in the execution where we actually run another power I case Oliver using the output of the first one to drive the control so that this control actually you know ends up where it belongs and then from there you can animate it in a sort of additive fashion and that's what happens right here so we're gonna connect the execution up what we do here is get the thorax bone so this is the transform of the thorax that that bone at the body of the of the spider at the point app right after the first power IKS solved so we're after power okay has moved all the feed positions and updated the thorax position you've got a brand new post with the spider sort of leaning or reaching for its feet positions then we get that thorax position and move the thorax control which is a separate transform based on the the result of that first solver here I'm using the Verlaine node which comes with control rig and and that's what adds sort of some damping and bouncing on top of that thorax control and then I'm setting another dummy transform called the thorax effector and I'm setting that transform so we're kind of taking the result of the first solver copying that on to a dummy running it through a relay filter and setting a final effector transform and that transform then goes into the second power right case over here which has just one more effector so in the first one we had zero through seven we had eight effectors one for each foot in this solver we have zero through eight so we have one for each foot which is the same positions as the first solver but this eighth and final one takes the thorax so in that way we're able to grab that control which is moving the effector and have control over the thorax in an additive fashion and then once we're done with this solve we'll have I can show you what that looks like we basically have sort of the full body control since I've disconnected the the rest of it we're not going to have any control over the head or fangs or anything but those are all relatively simple so after after the thorax is moved and then you know we would have the head control that's why this isn't working so we can connect that back up we go through and we simply get the transform of the head control pump that into the head bone same with the fangs we're just taking those controls and putting those transforms directly into the bones and then finally I have the doing the same thing on the abdomen take that control transform and pipe it into the bone but I'm going again going through one of these four lay nodes and that's what gives you that extra layer of wiggle on the abdomen so that abdomen is wiggling relative to its parent which itself is wiggling relative to the feet so it's kind of a nice way of building up this layer where you know the feet are driving the thorax through a power and K solver and then the thorax is driving the abdomen you get this really kind of lively dynamic secondary motion so in the next video I'm going to show you how to get started setting something like this up thanks for watching

Channel: Power Animated Inc

Views: 14,535

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Id: 0_zuSWObXgY

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2020