Control Rig with Power IK

The Unreal Control Rig plugin allows the creation of user controlled animation rigs directly in the Unreal Editor. Control Rigs can be used to:

  1. Create keyframed animation sequences by animating "control" objects
  2. Create procedural effects that run in the Anim Graph using the Control Rig Anim Graph node

See the official Control Rig Documentation for more information.

Power IK provides full access to the Power IK solver directly in a Control Rig graph. This allows for the creation of sophisticated full-body IK rigs that users can interact with, animate and even drive dynamically at run-time.

Video Tutorials

The easiest way to understand how Control Rig works is to see it in action. Check out our two part tutorial series on using Control Rig with Power IK:

In Part 1, we are given an overview of an advanced Spider rig in Control Rig that uses a layered Power IK setup to create an auto-additive thorax control complete with dynamics.

In Part 2, we create a Spider Control Rig from scratch, add a root control and then rig up the legs to be controlled with Power IK.

How to Drive Control Rigs At Runtime

Control Rig assets can be used to perform an operation on an input pose, to produce a new output pose. You can embed them in Unreal's Anim Graph do to procedural modifications using Vector or float variables.

Vector variables may come from other Components, Event Graphs or blueprint logic. You can use normal Control rig "Controls" for debugging, testing and keyframe animation. When you want to drive an effect procedurally from gameplay code or blueprint, convert the Effector inputs to parameters and expose them using this method.

Open a Control Rig blueprint:

  1. Right-click in the Rig Graph and get a variable of type "vector".
  2. Plug the vector parameter into an effector position.
  3. Name the vector parameter.

Now open an Anim Graph:

  1. Create a Control Rig node.
  2. Set the class to the Control Rig blueprint.
  3. Observe the named blueprint parameters in the details.
  4. Click the Use Pin checkbox to expose the parameter as a pin.
  5. Connect a Vector variable to the Anim Graph pin.