Demoing 5.4 Animation & Rigging Updates | Inside Unreal

This week we'll be chatting with some of the team behind the incredible updates to animation & rigging in 5.4! Covering topics ranging from modular control rigs to updates with sequencer, there'll be tons of live demo and content examples to look through & learn from. As always, don't forget to participate in our live Q&A!

[kvickart]

TIMESTAMPS

Speakers:
Benoit Gadreau - Senior Animation Programmer - 9:50
Greg Richardson - Senior Technical Product Manager - 10:35
Helge Mathee - Principal Software Engineer - 11:10
Kiaran Ritchie - Principal Animation Prorammer - 12:07

9:15 Stream start, Introductions
12:52 Skeletal Mesh Editing Suite, Kiaran
1:04:42 Modular Rigging to create characters, Helge
1:46:40 Layered Animation with Control Rig, Greg
2:11:02 Animation UX Improvements, New TRS Gizmos, Benoit
2:15:36 Deformer Graph

2:26:34 Q&A

2:27:51 Q: In UE there are 3 ways to do IK, how do I decide which to use?
2:30:00 Q: Is there a way to add a curve float/lookup table inside control rig?
2:30:57 Q: Do you plan to support pens with pressure sensitivity for map/weight painting?
2:31:32 Q: Can you bind hotkeys to all of these modeling/rigging tools?
2:33:11 Q: Does the bone orientation (of a bone) make a difference to modular rig?
2:35:10 Q: Do modular rigs work fine with layered control rigs?
2:36:19 Q: Are there plans to increase the execution stack memory limit of control rig VM?
2:40:50 Q: For chain dynamics, can I bake those animations?
2:41:45 Q: When using a control rig in sequencer is there a way to blend between FK/IK?
2:42:51 Q: How do you recommend we learn to use control rig?
2:46:55 Q: What are you most looking forward to with these tools?

Thanks for the stream! Have been working a lot on control rig lately so it came just in time for me.

[Bushmani]

Its oddly comforting knowing watching these 4 rigging masters still have a hangup during the process even if its a super minor one lol. Jokes aside you guys are awesome thank you for going through the steps instead of just posting a highlight reel or something safe.

[naza]

thank you for the five of you for being amazing..

[jorgevallejodecastro]

1:50 Boom! The power to combine programming with animation with control rig in the easy way

[junxia]

Those proxies on the bike and coin are incredible!

[_Clivey]

Please can you release the control rigs examples for the non-human characters. There are little examples for non-human, so those sharks/dragon/scooter ones are really important for us to understand them more.

[activemotionpictures]

1:30:17 - Is this file available to download (for studying purposes). What an interesting concept: modular driven springs.

[junxia]

The tools you guys are making and have already made towards a professional production-ready skinning system is really impressive!

Are you guys currently planning any layer systems like the ngskintools plugin for Maya? I know for me at least, a layer system has completely upgraded my skinning experience, not just for creating new assets, but for debugging purposes when a 3D bug comes down the pipeline. It's incredibly helpful to be able to leave the main skinning untouched with a nondestructive workflow. I can create a layer with rigid skinning one or more parts of the body and test different animations with it to pin-point the cause of certain errors, and then easily hide that layer again afterwards.

Alternatively, having multiple layers has also massively increased my control over where skinning will go if I reduce influence on one joint. If I have a leg layer where I have maximum influence on the entire leg to the toes, I can have a layer above the leg with max influence on the knee and below, and so on, so on. That way, when I decrease skinning on parts of the leg, there's no way skinning will automatically move to the chest or spine joint, since the leg layer underneath it already has max influence.

These might not be relevant though to the workflow experience you guys are trying to design for, but I'm definitely curious

[daoshen]

The portion on aligning local rotation reminds me why using cartesian coordinates (as opposed to another coordinate system appropriate to the task) in these engines as default, in many cases, leads us down a more difficult path.

In this specific case (starting approximately 22:55) we see the technical artist considering major orientations for those pivot points (very specifically not calling them bones). Those angles are rarely exact multiples of 90 degrees. Yet our reliance on Cartesian leads us in that direction. IMO, this is one of the primary factors leading to flaws with animations that result from our work. We should be able to set those major rotational axes in any direction and have less or more than three of them. A simple set of spherical coordinate vectors for instance. We might create tools around this, but then the engine ends up needing conversion back to Cartesian, and real-time work becomes constrained.

Note: I absolutely have no claim to better global solutions! Just noting something i'm constantly smashing my forehead into. <3

[AnimatorHeadSpace]

Great demo!

Is it possible to get a clickable ‘mirroring’ button for the control rigs. Right now there’s only mirroring by going into the pose library and creating a pose. There should be a way to have a one click solution. This would help animators out so much, especially when it comes to animating walk cycles and quadrupeds.

[Sei]

For the layered control rigs, rather than right clicking and setting priority, why not have priority set based on the position in the layer stack? What's on top gets applied first, etc.

[activemotionpictures]

42:00 - Please a LASSO selection. Is it available?

[olawozniak]

cool looks almost like adobe after effects but in 3d. i love it. this video incouraged me to start learning animations in UE. :)

[TheSlayerCompany]

No clue about Unreal Engine.. but i was here!

[RickHenderson]

This is so amazing. Are there videos on how the UE5 skeleton is structured? For example, why is the root on the ground, and why should there be a connection from the root to the left thigh Kiaran added?

[shalabology]

Ok, kinda came late. I recently managed to set up UE on PC from long years Max nd Maya rigging, this so new to me .good talk, i think i will need to check all those things rigging in UE ..thanks for sharing .

[abdulshabazz]

There's really not a reason to use the resource heavy IK/FK solver during gameplay: with the exception of blend spaces and a few others, common animation pose sequences should be cached via LSTM or transformers models to provide the best performance while supporting natural movement in complex game environments. I'll try to put together a demo for you and open a pull request.

[bryanwiitala]

The issue with Mixamo animations is a lack of a true root. What do you plan on doing in 5.5 to address that?

[BaseRealityVR]

Been strugelling to find an answer on how I can control the IK targets on the modules from animation BP Im not able to figure out how to expose the Modules IK values TO THE CONTROL RIG NODE IN ABP through the Modular rig

[randomancy]

If I wanted to start animating a car or spaceship, should I start using control rigs instead of something like a scene controller controlled in a blueprint?