Quantum Entanglement - Character Rigs - UE5
I created these three character rigs for my bachelor animation project. I wanted to try out how the Control Rig plugin in Unreal compares to the more traditional tools found in other software like Blender.
I started the project in Unreal version 4.27, but decided to switch to version 5.0 after seeing all the features added to the plugin. These greatly improved the rigs and made things a lot easier, thanks to a more modular approach. Unfortunately this version also came with a lot of crashes and some bugs, which will hopefully improve in future versions of the engine.
The armatures (skeletons) are pretty similar to the ones found in the Rigify addon for Blender. All characters share the same basic armature, which I modified slightly from the addon to add things like tweak bones, which wouldn't be needed in Blender.
Unreal 5 allows for the creation of custom shared Control Rig functions. These greatly simplify and speed up the creation of new Control Rigs.
I created a function which allows controlling bones trough their head and tail position instead of their position and rotation. This allows for much smoother deformations on clothing without big discontinuities.
The Template Control Rig is responsible for controlling the functionality which is shared between all three characters, which is most the Rigs.
Each character then has their own Control Rig, which first calls the functions inside the Template Rig and then does its own character specific functionality on top.
Because characters aren't made up of a single Mesh, each character has their own Blueprint which combines all the meshes and transfers control of the eyes from the Rig to the Material and Mesh.