Hi, everyone.
In this video, I will walk you through animating a MetaHuman
in Sequencer with Control Rig.
I have a new level sequence here and our MetaHuman Blueprint
already added to the scene.
All what we have to do is go to Track, Actor to Sequencer,
and choose our Blueprint.
You can as well drag and drop the MetaHuman Blueprint
directly to Sequencer.
In both cases, you should see the Control Rig tracks added
dynamically there.
This is because we have a new default animation rig property
on the skeleton meshes.
This property would allow Sequencer
to add the default Control Rigs associated with the skeletal
meshes automatically for you.
We have a very detailed video going over the face control
board and its amazing features.
So in this video, I will demonstrate mostly
on the body Control Rig.
However, all concepts shown here are applicable to any Control
Rig Unreal Engine.
The rig itself is quite simple, and many of you
will probably find it similar to other rigs
you may have used before.
Once you add a Control Rig to Sequencer,
you should see the Controls and Animation panel
on the left side.
The controls act as a Control Rig outliner,
where you can see all of the rig controls,
select them, and see their channels displayed here.
The animation panel has general settings
that apply to every control rig you have in the level.
We can display the hierarchy, spaces,
and show and hide manipulators.
These two options are not relevant anymore,
so we can skip this.
Coord System Per Widget Mode
allows you to have a different coordinate space
per transformer gizmo.
For example, here, I have all the space
associated with a translation and local space with rotation.
If I turn off this option, if I go back now to translation,
you will see it is local space or the same space
as the last selected transformer gizmo.
Only Select Rig Controls is a very useful option,
and I highly recommend enabling that
when animating in Sequencer.
Local Transforms in Each Local Space
would allow you to transform multiple selected objects
in their own local space.
To demonstrate that real quickly, by default,
the second selected object will transform in the local space
of the first selected object.
And you can see that clearly on the rig
because we have actually a matter of behavior on the rig,
so the correct behavior for the rig
would be like this when this option is on.
So I also recommend enabling this option when
working with a MetaHuman rig.
Gizmo Scale is pretty self-explanatory,
and it can come in real handy when
animating with multiple controls close to each other.
With all of this info out of the way,
let's start animating in Sequencer.
For even better accessibility and more selection options,
you can use our MetaHuman Control Rig picker.
You can find it in the Sample MetaHuman folder under
the Common Utilities.
Just run the widget, select the actor, and you are ready to go.
There are extra options here like selecting
all of the finger controls, showing and hiding
the body controls, and switching IK and FK.
You can also switch all of the names IK and FK mode
on the global control from the Controls panel or in Sequencer.
I will try and keep our animation experiment here
really simple and just create an arm wave.
I'll start by making sure that I have
Only Select Rig Controls option on.
And with control-alt-drag, select all of the body
controls, and add a key frame by pressing S in Sequencer.
Now, in FKR mode, I will select the upper arm, wrist, lower arm,
select all arm controls, and add a key frame.
I can switch to IK mode in the MetaHuman Control
Rig picker, or in the channels on the left side,
or in Sequencer.
It is placed on the global controller.
I will switch it here in Sequencer.
That will add a keyframe on all of our armed controls,
both IK, FK, so they snap in place.
After a few frames, I will-- let's try create a wave.
If you are interested in learning more
about Control Rig and [INAUDIBLE],
make sure to check out our Control Rig team
talks on Unreal Engine Learning Channel.
We have two options to bake to skeletal animation.
You can choose to Bake Animation Sequence,
and you can choose to Create Linked Animation Sequence.
Linked Animation Sequence will make this track
on the newly-exported animation.
This just try this quick.
I will save the animation in the Metahuman Animations folder.
Name it Metahuman Wave and Create.
If I close Sequencer and go to our animation,
you will see we have the new animation exported here.
If I open the animation and edit in Sequencer,
it should give us the option to open the
level sequence where this animation was created or baked
in.
Now, it is open and we have the animation on the Control Rig
is still here.
So what if you have a skeletal animation that wasn't
created using a Control Rig?
We have the ability to target skeletal animations
on a Control Rig thanks to the Backwards Solve graph.
This one really opens the opportunity
for different configurations of how
we would like to retarget your skeletal animations
on the Control Rig.
To demonstrate this, I will use a much better animation
this time.
We'll start with deleting the MetaHuman Control Rig.
Just need to go back to the default pose, Delete.
And then, animation track and I would
look for the animation we have.
This is obviously much, much better animation than our wave.
So in order to bake this, right mouse click
on the body, Bake to Control Rig,
and we have our MetaHuman Control Rig.
It will take a couple of minutes.
I want it to be one-to-one, so I will disable reduce keys.
Now, we have the animation
retargeted on our Control Rig, which is really great.
If you would like to edit on top of this,
you can either edit the curves in the Curve Editor
or you can as well add an additive animation track.
You will not need to do this step in the future,
but for now, you need to make sure all of the global
values are set to the default values in the additive layer
to how they are on the rig.
For example, the arm l FK IK switch is off by default.
And the legs IK FK switch are on by default.
There are also a couple of other values on the FK arm
to set to local space and the head as well.
Now, if we scrub through the additive layer,
you will see we have the expected behavior.
Let's make her bend a little bit more in here.
So in this case, we would select all the spine controls.
OK, this section.
And go-- add a bit more here.
Press S. And a little bit more here and press S.
Let's fix this small intersection
with the hands and the pants.
I will select the FK arm control.
Add a key frame here and here.
And in between, I will just rotate the hand
up a little bit.
And there you go.
This is probably the easiest way to work
with baked animation in Sequencer,
and it is quite effective.
And this wraps up our video.
I really hope you like it, and we are all really
looking forward to animations in engine.
Thank you.