Control Rig is a node-based rigging system, designed to provide riggers and animators with tools to create flexible, dynamic, and procedural characters with artist-friendly interfaces. Unlike Blueprint, Control Rig uses its own lighter-weight VM called RigVM to provide highly efficient pose calculations. Users can create runtime and animation rigs by connecting nodes, called Rig Units, together in a Control Rig Graph.
Importing a Skeletal Mesh will generate a Rig Hierarchy. The Rig Hierarchy’s bones, along with additional bones, spaces, and controls created in the Control Rig Editor, can be inputs or outputs to Rig Units, similar to a Pose being an input or output to Anim Nodes in an Animation Blueprint. Control Rig is not limited to just Skeletal Meshes. Users can create Control Rig Components in Blueprint Actors to animate other components, such as Static Meshes or Lights, by getting Control values from the Control Rig Component.
You may want to use the Control Rig system in your projects if you are looking at ways to Animate in Engine, procedurally animate or creating custom Retargeting or FullBody IK solutions. Full python integration allows you to customize and automate complex tasks for any production.
Enabling the Control Rig Plugin
To use Control Rig, you will first need to enable the Control Rig Plugin:
- From the Main Editor under Edit, select Plugins.
- From the Animation tab, enable the Control Rig plugin.
- Restart the Editor for the plugin to be applied.
You can create Control Rig Blueprints, Control Rig Gizmo Libraries, and create Control Rig tracks with Level Sequences from the Add /Import button under Animation:
Further Reading
Creating Sequences for Control Rig