Tutorial: Control rig: Edit animations - Unreal Engine 4 + Unreal Engine 5

[Music] welcome to this tutorial about how you can edit your animations using the control rig in unreal engine and this will work similar for unreal engine 4 and so let's just jump into it so here we are inside of unreal engine 4.26 if you want to follow along this is a third person template which i have migrated the control rig into and if you don't know how to do that i will post some links to videos so you're up to speed when it comes to both doing that and how to use the sequencer now to be able to edit an animation what we need to do is we need to first make a cinematic so we add a level sequence and we just choose a standard name like so with our level sequence in place we then want to add our skeletal mesh so in this case i have this skeleton mesh for the mannequin i'll just put put him in there and then we go back to the sequencer and we can just drag the skeleton mesh of the mannequin into this sequence to get a track for him now to begin with what we want to do is have an animation that we want to edit so as a placeholder for that we're going to be using the third person run in this case and if we look at it this is what it looks like when it's being played and that looks fine but we want to change a few things the first of those things being that we want to change the length of the sequence so to have it match and currently you can see this red bar here indicates the end of the sequence and if we hold in control we keep the mouse wheel to scroll in and out to zoom in and out on the animation and we can put it on a level where it's actually fitting the animation like this so that when it plays that's what's happening um so now we need to get into uh making this animation uh editable and to be able to do this you need to have set up both your forward and your backward solver for your control rig because when we're doing this we're right clicking on our mannequin in this case and then we're doing a bake to the mannequin rig control ring that we want that will and you can we can choose to reduce keys or not if you want to i'm going to choose to reduce keys because i'm only going to be wanting one um a fewer set of keys so it's easier to change in the the edits that i'm going to be making clicking in the bake to control rig will then disable your animation and instead show you how that is translated into your control rig so now if we drag along the lines here you can see that we're still doing the animation just like before however now we also have the ability to edit it using our control rig so for example let's say we wanted to change this uh this placeholder animation to be something like he's not supposed to be running he's supposed to be doing a victory pose so maybe we want the head instead to be looking to the right over here because he's like posing to someone here so we'll put a new keyframe over here and then when we check the other frames here you're going to see it's going to immediately snap back to whatever it was before here on the second frame but for our purposes we don't really need that so we want to remove all the other frames that are framed for this head so that he continues looking to the right while he's running and you see his head is following along with his body so this made that specific change pretty easy because everything conforms let's say we wanted to make another change as well let's say we wanted to make him do a fist bump with his right hand while he's running to make it look like he's like really triumphant so what we can do then is we can change this along how we want it to look and let's see maybe we bring it up a bit maybe we bring it out a bit maybe a bit further like so maybe a bit backwards maybe we need to rotate the hand a little bit so it doesn't look like he's breaking his hand and maybe outwards a bit as well actually i think i'm doing bad things to his hand right now okay so let's look from the sides it looks like he is sort of doing some weird fist bump let's bring it out a bit a little like so a little bit more closely to the body so let's say that that's the fist bump kind of pose he wants to hold so then we can put another keyframe here which means that we will overwrite the keyframe for the right hand over here but again if we move forward you can see it snaps back to whatever position it had in the rest of the animation and in this case we're gonna pretend that i don't want any of these animations at all over here i want this fist bump and then moving it forward maybe to let's say to here but there maybe and we can say that since his left hand has been moved backwards a bit maybe the right hand should be a bit forward because the human body tends to have a pendulum motion right so we'll set the keyframe over there and then maybe we'll bring it forward again more and we'll see that over here actually has his left hand forward again so we should probably bring this back a bit again so maybe something like that and then we'll put another keyframe and then we can look at what it looks like so now you can see his hat he has this sort of swaying hand motion over here so let's play that and see what it looks like looks like it goes a bit fast but you can see it's sort of like he has a weird sway to his his arm sort of a victory pose now so let's say that we have done all the changes now that we want and this this is the new animation that we want to have what we do then is we right click on our mannequin and then we say bake the animation sequence and then we name it something like a name run which so and then we export it and then you see it has created an animation over here we can open it up and you can see since this was a looping animation we can see it's looping here so this is what it will be looking like looping and now you see we get a little bit of a snapping because the first and the last frame in this animation that we've changed here for the hand are not the same that's a good animation technique to make sure that the first and last frame have the same position so that the loop is better than this but this was just to demonstrate how you can change an animation if there's something about it that you want to edit and that's basically all you need to do if you want to use your control rig to edit an animation there is a different way also let's we can stop this for now we can save let's go find our third person let's do this let's remove everything here our mannequin let's remove our mannequin from over here let's remove our level sequence over there like so we'll save everything now there is a different way you can also edit this if you were to go to your animations then you have the run here for example you can say over here also edit in sequencer and then you can bake it to a control rig and clicking it over here and then you get reduced keys and that brings everything in automatically to be here except i didn't seem to have gotten a skeleton this time actually i did it's over there so yeah that is a different way you can do this if you want to um it okay it seems like i got the the animation for run victory i'm not sure if that's the one i opened no it's not anyway so so it opened up the wrong one but that's a different way that you can also open up um to type and edit through this i hope all that made sense and you're able to see how it works so that you can make use of it for your own edits of animations hopefully found this video helpful if you liked the video leave a like if you did not like it leave a dislike leave any suggestions or comments you might have down below subscribe and share this video if you want to see more like it in the future that is all for now keep on learning take care

Channel: LeafBranchGames

Views: 1,494

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine 5, Tutorial, Game development, Animation, Edit animation, Control rig, Beginner, Intermediate

Id: vgWVHROK-eo

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021

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Video link: https://youtu.be/vgWVHROK-eo

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