today I'm going to be showing you the
animation and rigging toolkit that is
now available to subscribers of the
Unreal Engine 4 to get started I'm going
to create a character um the first step
of creating character is of course
determining what its skeleton hierarchy
is going to be so here um I've uh set up
some of its uh joint presets and here
I'm adding a custom joint chain for a
ponytail after we've created our
skeleton we jump right into the skeleton
placement as you can see there are no
actual joints yet but instead we have
this mesh I refer to this as the
mannequin uh I built this so that
basically you can go ahead and um get
something for the animators without
having to have final art so we get a
concept we can mock up a mesh like this
and then uh we can get it to the
animators we then can hand off the mesh
to the modelers they can build the model
to that and then we just switch out the
mesh with the final one when we're done
so the joint mover which you're looking
at here is a rig for placing your
skeleton quickly so it has a bunch of
features like you just saw uh there's
aiming uh there's symmetry real time um
there's also a physique mode now
physique is just for Aesthetics this is
only if you are in that situation I
described of you don't have final art
and you want to mock up something or if
you even if you're just prototyping a
character you can use this tool so here
I can kind of change the mannequin a bit
to make it something more in style with
what I'm trying to do based off of the
concept now the joint mover has has
different moving modes uh the yellow
controls that you see right now on the
screen those are the global movers so if
I grab a global mover it will grab all
the children below as well what you're
looking at right now the pink controls
are the mesh movers which only affect
the geometry and do not affect the joint
placement at all so they're just
aesthetic movers the blue movers that uh
were up there earlier are offset movers
which only affect that selected joint
and nothing else
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so just a few more tweaks here on the
spine using our physique mode and then
we can actually go ahead and save this
workout to a physique template we can
also save out templates for our skeleton
creation and for our joint mover which
is what I'm doing here uh that way you
can load these in at any time and use
them as a starting point for other
characters or whatever you
need now once we've kind of gotten our
skeleton place or our mannequin
prototype mesh made we go ahead and we
create a rig pose now the rig pose is
essentially a t- pose but it's really
just the animator friendly version of
the pose like for the ponytail for
example we may not want it to be curved
in the rig pose but maybe that's how it
was
modeled so I line up the joints to the
model but then I can uh actually
straighten it in the
rig here the proxy mesh is automatically
waited for you that was a popup that
actually popped up a few moments ago uh
then we go into different mode where you
can polish up your skin weights and
publish your character for the animation
team so we give our character a name we
put it in a specified project and then
we go ahead and hit build which will go
ahead and kick off the rig building
process uh in this case she hasn't been
created before so we create a thumbnail
for her so we make a little thumbnail in
the viewport go ahead and hit
build builds the
rig and then it tells you what files
were created you can browse to those
files you can check them out
um drag them into your per
force now for the animation toolkit uh
here we're going to add a character so
this is I'm an an an animator I want to
add the character for animation and uh
what you're seeing now are some of the
UI modes there's a picker a custom
outliner View and then all the rig
settings uh I'm just going to cover some
of the unique rig features like here is
the auto hips we also have the auto
spine so if you're an ik spine the auto
spine will uh automate the position of
the spine control and of course the
autoc claps which as you can see will
automate the class based on the hand
position the custom ponytail that I
added earlier the custom chain module
has built-in Dynamics all the chains do
so you can go ahead and uh actually have
baked in physics into your
animations lots and lots of different
settings on the rig not going to go into
too much depth in the video of course
there's a standard stuff like ik FK
matching importing motion both M cap and
animation data exporting your fpx to the
Unreal Engine or animation data space
switching is the tool that we um that I
created so that our animators could
forego the use of constraints um in this
example I created a cube put the body
control in the cube space now I can
animate the cube to drive the body but I
still have full control over the body
and this is is available on all I
controls now I'll look at the pose
editor so I've created a little pose and
I'm going to uh save a thumbnail of this
pose give it a category give it a
name and then on a clean scene I can
load in the
pose I can load in mirrors of the pose I
can load in what I call the ghost pose
which is a mesh version of the pose and
I can move and rotate this in space and
then wherever whenever I'm done I can
hit snap and the rig will snap to its
position and then the last feature I
kind of want to touch on is the iso
select uh if you generate your ISO
selection sets you can then go in and
start hiding elements of your mesh um
this is done based off the weighting of
the verts to the bones so this will work
on any mesh it doesn't have to be a
segmented mesh like this and uh that's
it if you want to see more just go to
docs. unrealengine.com look for the my
animation bring tools thank you very
much