Creating basic Control Rig controllers

The Alien Plant only needs a very simple forward kinematics (FK) rig setup. This sounds very complicated but FK is just basically the same parent/child setup we did with the skeleton itself. The child bone follows the parent all the way down the chain. Our FK animation rig controllers will behave in the same way.

Note

In animation, there are two main ways to control a joint: FK and inverse kinematics (IK). We will cover FK in this chapter and IK in Chapter 15, Creating a Control Rig with Basic IK Controls for the Robot in UE5.

Let's create our controllers. First, we'll create a few simple control shapes.

Creating two simple control shapes

We'll start in a very simple way and create two control shapes that will control our skeleton bones. Control shapes are the things we select in the 3D Viewport to move our character in the scene:

1. Right-click on an empty space in the Rig Hierarchy panel and select New | New...