I kept looking at the last video I posted and got really annoyed at how bad the animations of the patrol bot looked. This drove me to remake the animation rig for the patrol bot (to be much, much simpler) and I started making a control rig in unreal to push the animations there (see https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/how-to-create-control-rigs-in-unreal-engine).
Now why use Control rigs? Honestly not too sure yet… My hope is that IK is easier (so I dont have to add IK bones) but adding these controls seems tedious, in addition your forward solve block I guess has to be a big tower of blueprint power?
I’m probably missing the plot here, but also my “forward solve” seems to be undoing my “backwards solve” where I assumed “backwards solve” was used for IK situations. I’m still playing around but the hope is that by using unreal internals I should be able to handle the physicality of the bots a bit better than I expect.
Also I had an gmmk numpad (https://www.gloriousgaming.com/products/gmmk-numpad-keyboard?srsltid=AfmBOoqt9KEojE6tva-cmlDcTDtw1XiBNFEktoFWoobeNvWKYGD8ZtL0 I got it on sale for $90 but I think its still crazy overpriced) which I wanted to use for ableton and never got working (the slider plus the knob weren’t configurable to midi in). So I installed a via flavor of QMK ( https://caniusevia.com/ ) which lets me configure my keyboard in browser.
Which would be amazing if: 1.) Firefox supported usbhid and 2.) If I could remap the slider. But right now its really good for me using OBS to record rather than the snipping tool which records at like 20fps.
So for example here’s the control rig I described in action, BUT there’s no OBS window visible!
Otherwise I think I’m still dead-set on remaking the patrol bot animations in unreal. Walking and reload might be the most annoying but mostly I want to be able to make quick animations without the huge headache of .fbx exporting and importing (even with the blender unreal addons https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/download-our-new-blender-addons , which work amazing for static meshes, kinda sketchy for skeletal). I kinda wish unreal had the option of slicing the animation list of an FBX and attempting bone resolution before importing. I really want to get this working because then my workflow stays in unreal for animating. Blender is still blows unreal out of the water for making meshes IMO but animations in Blender still seem hacky with the action editor.
There are a few things I’m actively annoyed with when it comes to control rigs (which I wont show you here because I’m still WIP with this one.) I’m also a straight up control rig novice so I bet as I learn these problems might be solved with better practices.
1.) You cant manipulate the control shapes in the editor preview window. Seems like that would be an easy addition and should match the same kind of workflow as the “hold control to bump physics asset” thing.
2.) Control rigs are effected by bones. This one I get WHY but it seems counter-intuitive that you would ever want to make a rig that is controlled by a parent bone. I get the idea of attaching to a bone in order to have like a small sub object (for example a turret on a large ship).
3.) When you add a control to a bone it adds it to the children of that Bone. This would be fine if #2 wasn’t a thing.
4.) Adding Default forward solve assignments are not automated. I bet I could find a python script to do this but still, that blueprint tower of power really can and should be made upon generating a new control for a bone.
Still gonna push ahead with the control rigs though…Modular rigs freak me out (https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/Dd31/unreal-engine-modular-control-rig-rigging-with-modules) and seem to be used primarily for bipedal skeletons.