Animation Mode

Animation Mode is a Mode in Unreal Engine that exposes new tools, panels, and editor behaviors that assist your animation workflows. Using this Mode when animating with Control Rig offers a more animation-focused editor experience, with tabs to aid in selecting Controls, transform displays, and launching tools.

This document provides an overview of Animation Mode, including its user interface, tools, and settings.

Prerequisites

• You have created a Control Rig Asset. See the Control Rig Quick Start page for information on how to do this.
• Animation Mode is mainly dependent on using Control Rig within Sequencer, therefore a basic knowledge of Sequencer is required.

Enabling Animation Mode

Animation Mode can be enabled in the following ways:

1. Dragging a Control Rig Asset from the Content Browser into a Level. This will create a new Level Sequence, add the character with a Control Rig Track, and enable Animation Mode.

   

2. Selecting a Control Rig Track in Sequencer.

   

3. Manually enabling Animation Mode by clicking the Mode dropdown menu and selecting Animation. Alternatively, you can also press Shift + 7.

   

Animation Mode can be disabled and normal level editing mode restored either by selecting the Mode dropdown menu and clicking Select, or by pressing Shift + 1.

Animation Mode Overview

Animation Mode is a level editor Mode which contains specialized editing interfaces and workflows. Activating it will add the following panels to the Unreal Editor interface:

1. The Animation panel, which contains Animation Mode Tools, Settings, and Space Switching Controls.
2. The Anim Outliner, which is an Outliner modified to only show Controls on the selected Control Rig.
3. Anim Details, which is a Details panel modified to only show relevant animatable properties of selected Controls.

Anim Outliner

The Anim Outliner panel displays all animatable Controls and organizes them according to their hierarchy, as defined in the Control Rig.

Selecting Controls here will also select them in the Viewport and Sequencer. Inversely, selecting Controls in either the Viewport or Sequencer selects them here, too.

Control icons inherit the control shape color of their control, which makes it easier to read the control and match it to the Viewport color.

Anim Details

The Anim Details panel displays relevant animatable properties for the selected Control, including properties of children channel Controls.

Transform values are relative to the Initial Local / Global values defined on the Control in the Control Rig Asset, therefore, the "zero-point" of these Controls is equal to those values.

Boolean, Float, Integer, and Enum Controls that are children of a selected Control will automatically be selected when selecting the parent, and will display within the Anim Details panel as Channels. This way, you can manipulate these Controls at the same time as the parent, and also create custom attributes and channels on a single Control.

Animation Mode Tools

The Animation panel contains the following tools to aid your animation workflows:

Poses Tool

The Control Rig Pose Tool is a tool that stores and retrieves data on your Controls. You can save the relative pose on selected Controls, adjust the thumbnail icon, and configure your saved pose to apply to symmetrical Controls.

Saving Poses

To save a new pose, first select the Controls you want to include in the pose, then click Create Pose in the toolbar. You will then be prompted to name the pose Asset. Enter a name, then click Create Asset to create the pose. The new pose will be created within the selected folder.

You can also adjust the Thumbnail by selecting the pose in the browser, changing your Viewport camera, and clicking Capture Thumbnail.

Applying Poses

Before applying poses, you must ensure you have the appropriate Controls selected. You can do this either by manually selecting the Controls or by selecting the pose and clicking Select Controls, which selects all Controls from that pose.

There are several ways you can apply saved poses to your Controls. You can either:

• Double-click the pose from the browser, which will apply the selected pose.

  

• Click Paste Pose.

  

• Manipulate the Blend Pose Slider, which will apply the pose partially based on a delta between the current pose of the Controls and the selected Pose. A value of 0 will maintain the current pose, whereas a value of 1 will fully apply the selected pose.

  

Enabling the Key option will create Keyframes when a pose is applied to the selected Controls.

Mirroring Poses

For humanoid and other symmetrical rigs, you can also apply your poses on either side of the line of symmetry. This is done with a combination of namespace searching and axis mirroring and flipping. Enabling the Mirror option will apply your saved poses to the other side, ensuring you select the Controls first.

By default, the naming convention system assumes Left and Right are designated as _l_ and _r_ respectively. You can change this by editing the Right Side and Left Side property fields to match your Control Rig's symmetry designation. For example, you may want to change these properties to read as _left and _right if your symmetry designation is a postfix.

Mirror Axis is where you designate the axis of symmetry along your character. In most cases this will remain as X if you use a standard Y - Facing character in Unreal Engine.

Axis to Flip is the rotation axis to maintain while inverting the others in order to calculate the mirrored pose. In most cases this should be set to X, which is meant to keep rotational X values the same, while inverting Y and Z.

Because of the arbitrary nature of some Control Rigs, you should ensure your Control Rig symmetry is constructed in such a way that it can appropriately comply with axis mirroring and flipping.

Additional Controls and Hotkeys

Right-clicking on a pose will expose a context menu with the following commands:

Holding Alt and double-clicking a pose will select the Controls from that pose.

Folder Display

By default, the folder structure for saving and using poses is Content/ControlRig/Pose. In cases where you want to save to a different directory, or have imported poses that are not within this default directory, you can add other folders to your pose tool directory.

To do this, right-click in the directory area and select Add Existing Folder To View. Select the folder you want to add and click OK.

The folder, and any poses within, should now display in the pose tool directory.

Tweens Tool

The Tweens Tool can be used to adjust the interpolation between two keyframes by adding a third at the Playhead location as an in-between key. This keyframe can then be weighted between the two opposing keyframes.

With the Tween Controller open, select your keyframed Controls and ensure your playhead is between two keyframes. Manipulate the Tween Controller value by either dragging the slider or typing in a value between -1 and 1. A value of -1 will cause the new in-between keyframe to match the value of the preceding keyframe, whereas a value of 1 will match the next keyframe's value.

Snapper Tool

The Snapper Tool can be used to pin your Controls to other sources for a duration of time. Rather than attaching the Control, it bakes keyframes instead, so you can easily modify the resulting animation after snapping. You can snap to other Controls, objects in Sequencer, or the world.

Snapper Tool Usage

To use the Snapper Tool, you must first define the Child and Parent actors. Clicking on the Children or Parent buttons will assign your current selection to that category. In this example, the Hand Control is selected to be the Child, and the Ball is selected to be the Parent.

Next, if needed, you can define the range of time for the snapping effect to be active and where Keyframes will be baked. In this example the range of time is specified between frames 6 - 24.

Lastly, there are a few settings available that control the snapping behavior:

Clicking Snap Animation will perform the snap operation. In this example, Keep Offset is enabled in order to maintain the hand at the top of the ball.

Motion Trail Tool

The Motion Trail Tool previews your overall Control motion by drawing the motion as an interactable curve in the Viewport. You can then edit the motion by manipulating the keyframes along the curve.

Motion Trail Usage

After opening the Motion Trail window, enable the Show Trails option to make the motion curve visible for your selected Controls.

Selecting other Controls or multi-selecting Controls while Show Trails is enabled will draw motion trails for those Controls, too.

Enable the Show Keys option to draw the position information of Keyframes along the curve. Select these keys in the Viewport to reveal a manipulator you can use to edit the position data of your motion from the Viewport.

Motion Trail Properties

The following properties and features are available in the Motion Trail tool:

Motion Trails can be enabled for non-Control Rig objects and actors in Sequencer by using the console command: Sequencer.UseOldSequencerTrails 0. This will disable the legacy transform trajectory display, enabling the new Motion Trails tool to be used instead.

Pivot Tool

The Pivot Tool creates a temporary pivot point for a selected Control, which can then be moved to any arbitrary point. This tool is useful if you need to temporarily manipulate a Control relative to other points. After enabling the Pivot Tool, clicking Edit enables the pivot to be moved to different points. Clicking Pose will lock the pivot to its current position, where manipulating it will move the selected Control relative to the pivot.

Pivot Tool Usage

There are several hotkeys and behaviors to aid you using the Pivot Tool in different ways.

Animation Mode Settings

In the Animation Mode Panel, you can expand the Animation Settings section to reveal the following additional settings: