Overview

This tutorial will guide you through the process of adding physics to an existing Control Rig so that you can control almost all aspects of its behaviour in a simple and intuitive way. The resulting Control Rig can be used in-game or for animating in-engine. However, please note that the Control Rig Physics plugin is experimental, so we do not recommend using it for production purposes.

We'll assume basic familiarity with Unreal Engine and Control Rig. The starting asset used in this tutorial is available for free on FAB, and the tutorial will take you through and explain the steps you can take to add physics to it. Of course, there are many other ways to add physics to a control rig - it all depends on what you want to do with it. Consider this a suggestion and a starting point for your own experimentation.

Introduction to Control Rig Physics

The Control Rig Physics plugin enables the addition of simulated movement and collision to control rigs. This is done through four components, associated with elements in the control rig hierarchy:

• Physics Solver. This acts as a local "world" with its own settings, separate from the global game world and solvers. It manages the simulation of the Physics Bodies it contains.
• Physics Body. This represents the movement and collision properties associated with an element (typically a bone) in the hierarchy. It needs to be added to a Physics Solver to be updated.
• Physics Joint. This connects two bodies together in two ways. It limits the movement between them, typically by pinning them together (with a joint or articulation), as well as limiting the angular movement. It can also be used to drive them towards a target, behaving like a motor in a robot, or a muscle in a creature.
• Physics Control. This is typically used to control one body relative to another (where the second body can be the world/simulation itself), using soft/springy physical constraints.

Rather than providing a single "black box" approach, it is up to the user to integrate these components into their control rig. In order to make this as easy and powerful as possible, there are numerous functions available to you in the control rig graph.

Getting started

This section of the tutorial guides you through the steps needed to prepare a simple project containing a non-physical Mech control rig, as a starting point for the rest of the tutorial.

Making a tutorial project

Using Unreal Engine 5.7 (or later), create a new project using the Blank template (Blueprint). In Edit->Plugins, enable the PhysicsControl, ControlRigPhysics and Locomotor plugins and close the editor.

Plugins needed for this tutorial

In the Epic Launcher, open Fab and search for the Control Rig Samples Pack. Add it to your library, and then add it to your project. You might need to show all projects and tell the system to add it as a UE 5.6 pack.

Control Rig Samples Pack on FAB

Adding tutorial resources