Chapter 14: Making a Custom Rig for Our Alien Plant with Control Rig

In the previous chapter, we completed a more complex skeleton for the robot. Now we'll move on to the next stage of creating an animation-friendly rig in Unreal Engine (UE). Creating a skeleton and skinning it are the first steps toward making our 3D model or character animatable. We will learn how to add controllers that make it easier for animators to animate it.

With good controllers on top of a skeleton, it makes it possible for animators to edit, organize, and refine animations in a much more effective way. The general process of setting up a more complex 3D model to be animatable is called rigging it.

Rigging has three general steps:

1. Creating a skeleton
2. Skinning the 3D model to the skeleton
3. Creating controllers to drive or control our skeleton, otherwise called creating an animation rig

Until recently, there weren't any effective tools in UE to create and manage animation...