Announcing Ephemeral Rigging for the Unreal Engine

As mentioned in my last post, there’s a reason why I’ve been pretty silent lately. I’ve hinted at the existence of some secret project, a creation for which the world was not yet ready.

I’m very pleased to announce that, thanks to the assistance of a MegaGrant from Epic Games, Notional Pipe is working on bringing fully contextual ephemeral rigging and dense animation data editing to the Unreal Engine! Check out our first demo for ephemeral manipulation:

Yes, that’s the ephemeral system working in Control Rig! Unlike previous tools I’ve created with Unreal, this isn’t hacked together with duct tape and chewing gum–thanks to Epic’s support, Tagore and I have been able to devote the time to do this one properly.

I won’t say we haven’t experienced some pain during the process, largely due to there being very limited documentation on how Control Rig works internally, but Unreal in general (and Control Rig in particular) is a far more inviting environment for us to develop animation tools in than Maya has ever been. Unreal doesn’t force you into a dependency graph model the way Maya does. Instead, a “Rig Unit”--that’s what nodes in Control Rig are called–is allowed to do anything it wants to the entire hierarchy. Ephemeral rigging fits into this model much more smoothly.

We’re already working on expanding the system to include the kinds of dense animation data editing tools I’ve always wanted. Animating ephemerally in a fully real-time environment is going to be incredible.