This year I have started learning Unreal Engine on the side as a fun project. Something that really struck a cord with me is the new ControlRig animation system. To be honest, this opens some some amazing opportunities for VFX, but I can’t help but feel like it is more of an afterthought than full feature set, as if it is expected to do your animation in Maya/Blender, then use ControlRig to tweak it.
I see some real potential here in allowing artists to animate directly in-engine, but it’s going to need some work.

I design user interfaces, widgets and workflows for VFX, I’m not much of an animator but I respect the craft. So here begins my quest to allow animators to work entirely in Unreal. It’s a lot of work, and I only have a few hours a week to work on it, but perhaps this will snowball into something great, and maybe documenting my journey will inspire Epic to invest more in this area.
Let’s get started.

Breakdown: What’s broken?

• User Experience: The core functionality is there, but nothing to tie it together.
• Multiple Rig Visibility: Currently you can only show a single control rig at a time
• Timeline: The sequencer and graph editor have timelines, but they are finicky, animators need a simple timeline that is kept separate from animation. This will need support for pan, zoom and global manipulation of current keys.
• Rig Selection: To change active control rig requires several clicks and scrolls. This get’s really hard in heavy scenes.
• Animation Layers: The sequencer is great, but it is super crowded. Animators need a simpler view for general animation layering without all the clutter.
• Control Selector: There is a great ControlRig selector in the blueprint editor, can we pull this out to work in the level?
• Channel Editor: The ControlRig channel editor is clunky and get’s too big on large assets, This needs a scrollbar and shared editing where multiple selected controls share channels
• Rig Settings: Ik/Fk/Visibility/etc, exists but requires digging down into the rig
• Focusing: It’s difficult to frame in on anim curves or find selected controls in the view, sequencer and graph editor [Fixed in UE5]
• Constraints/Attachments: They exist but are tedious to set up an animate, will need an interface for these to find, view, create, remove and animate.
• Layers Panel: Layers do not support adding of Controls, may need a separate layer panel for control groups.
• ImagePlanes: There is ImagePlate, but it’s a lot of setup code and must be simplified
• Review Render: Unreal has a render movie option, but it’s not set up for rapid access. This needs to be tied into the timeline editor we make for partial reviews, stepped reviews and final reviews for client.
  

Assumptions

It’s important to note that we are working in Unreal, this is not Blender or Maya. While it is ok to bring some workflows over (like calling review render a playblast), We need to remember that we are working in the Unreal ecosystem, so we can assume the animators will need to learn to work with tracks for layering. Not everything will work the way they are used to and that is ok, but it must work and it must be easy to learn.

First Steps

In the prototype phase, nothing is pretty, but I’ll be experimenting with what the api already gives me and how I can leverage it.
My first point of interest is creating a control rig selector, I’ve confirmed that the api supports this, so it’s a good first step. From there I can move through the various selector panels for editing channels, layers and hopefully nab that visual control rig editor.

Regards,
Mr MinimalEffort