Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Modular Control Rig UE5.4 Preview

hi everyone so at GDC epic announced and released the preview for under engine 5.4 and with that came a load of new features and today I want to showcase one of those new features which is the modular control rig so I'm going to go through explain how to set it up and also how to make use of ik controls for arms and legs and the hip and start using it for animation purposes now this is just part one of a few videos I want to try and do the modular control rig as to show if it's full capabilities with this because it can be used for things other than skeletons like humanoids so let's jump in and have a look at the basics of how modular control rig is set up and used so we're going to get started creating our modular control rig now this is using under engine 5.4 preview so if you are us also using the preview be aware it does tend to crash uh now and then with these new tools but to get started you want to go into animation section and go down to control rig and select the control rig the new thing here is now going to get an option between control rig and the new modular rig which we're going to choose that one and we'll call this one skeleton KN control rig and got fin this up and in here the first thing you want to do is give it the preview mesh which you see down here please choose a preview mesh click on this and choose a skeleton mesh I'm going to choose the one I brought in earlier like this and as soon as you bring it in it's going to add some basic stuff for you straight away so you're going to see a root module in the module hierarchy down here has been added and it's got the connector to the root bone hence the little bone icon so the way this set up in the left hand side you've got the modular assets these are the pre-built modules for the modular control R so here you see the arm fingers feet and so on the module hierarchy shows you how each of these bones and modules are connected together and on the right hand side we've got our details panel which much like most details panels will change based upon what we select then we have our compile button so once You' put something in it's go there to compile it and it'll make sure it's all okay so when you first get started you'll notice you've got one socket in here and as you can see it's suggesting that this is the spine socket and Dr and drop the spine module in here and it's doing that up guessing based upon the name of the bone so if your bones aren't named correctly it may not tell you what it should be expecting um so you're going to have to uh go by the design of your model so can drag in our spine module now I personally don't like the list here I prefer in tile format makes it a little bit easier to read and I'll make them a little bit bigger as well so let's put in our spine so drag in our spine and let go now every time you add a new module it's going to give you more sockets to attach stuff too the first thing you want to do though before you get too far is just want to look over here on the module hierarchy and see how this is working so what it does is it gives you a spine start bone it's indicated that it spine 01 is the start bone if this is incorrect you can just click on the drop down and choose the correct bone it should be and likewise here's a spine n bone at spine O3 so if your bones haven't been named correctly or in bad naming convention this is where you can fix that problem and you also have details about what controls are as well so you can see the pelvis bone has been set to pelvis which is correct and the parent controls are these things at the bottom down here Global control you got body offset control which is this in a square like one okay so let's add more sockets onto this so as you can see if you hover your mouse over these ones they also tell you what they should expect so in this case this one's expecting the shoulder module so I'm going to go down to shoulder and drop that in it's best to wait for it to highlight when you're dragging it in so as you can see if I it in it goes grade out wait till it sort of lit up and then let go and it'll add it in you get less errors like that uh so let's put in the arms now and as you can see if you hover over it tells you it's going to to the arm module so so another thing you'll notice is that it's Auto coloring in the control rig uh controls based upon the left and right hand side of the character so left is blue right is red OB you can customize this however you like uh but it's a nice little feature that helps keep things organized uh and as we see when I've added the arms in it's now adding all the fingers in so let's just add those in here too and literally just simply drag and drop again wait for it to hover highlight and turn white then let go that way you guarantee it's going to land in the right spot there you go and the ones that got this sort of double circle icon this indic there's something in there and you can always click on this and you can see what's connected to it so here we've got the bone this end bone of the finger and this is the socket that it's identified okay and so it's figured it out for us it keeps it a bit organized you just click on it again it will close little menu will pop up let's do this side as well notice how I'm waiting for it to highlight in white Before I Let Go of the mouse and you should see everything in here is all good there's no like red text anywhere which is excellent okay we going to hit compile and that's the arms done now immediately to get started you'll notice if you were to grab the the hip ring here and pull this down it's going to go straight for the floor and that's because we haven't done the ik for the leg yet so let's set up the legs and so you can see that ik working so I'm going to drag in leg and attach it to each of those and wait for it to highlight there we go and then you've got your feet as well Place foot there and place the foot there so now if I track this down you'll see the ik is really been added for the knee bones and then the pole vectors which are these sort of uh lines coming out the knees here indicate which way the knee should be bent so if you find that they're it's a bit bowlegged like this and you want to bring them in a bit closer you can actually select these pole vectors and move them a bit closer to the center of the character so I'm going to move them like that and I'm going to go to this [Music] one move that one in like this and you'll notice now when the character bends their knees aren't bending out to the side anymore they're bending more head straight down which is a bit better you customize that however you want for your own Model A compile okay so that's the legs working but if the arms you'll see here if I were to set the arms here let me just close that and move this you'll notice that this is not iade and that's because by default for whatever reason the arms are set up to use FK so to fix that what you got to do is is in your hierarchal uh list here click on the arm and on the right hand side this panel scroll down until you see the FK I default turn that on when you do that it the controls are going to change to this Cube instead and now as I move this you'll see it's going to move the arm a lot more naturally much like need we've got a pole Vector here which you can edit as well there you go so let's do it for the other arm so I'm going to the other arm again it's probably easier to select it from the list here you don't want to accidentally click the fingers you want to make sure you get the arm itself and then go to FK ik default save so we got left here is the neck so put in the neckbone there we go compile save perfect okay so that is the modular control R setup now that's OB that's really a lot quicker than the old fashioned method of control R doing by hand it would taken hours this is now super quick and easy to put together and to use it what you got to do is just drag this into your scene and when you do so it's going to automatically go into the animation mode and there's the control rig all good to go and now I can move and animate the character very turn off snap um freely in my scene and we can pull them down make Crouch and things okay now this is the very basics of modu control rig we plan on doing a few more videos about how to hook it up so you get more constraints and a bit more control of the ik um but this is the very start of what we want to try and do with this um so yeah I look forward to more of that coming very very soon so there you have it that is the modular control rig a really cool new tool added in unre engine 5.4 now the UI and things might change by the time the release of 5.4 actually comes out fully but if it does I'll make an update video at that time now if you like this video want to see more videos about mod control rig and other things head the patreon.com ranl as we'll be exploring more about mod control rig some of more of its options and also how to use it to create control rigs for things that are not just humanoids so you can watch those episodes right now over patreon early before anyone else from just $1 a month thank you so much to all the patrons and YouTube members for the continu supporting the channel thanks for watching make sure you're subscribed and I'll see you next time bye everyone [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ryan Laley

Views: 5,009

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Id: SYSXFTBJr5Y

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024