Control Rig & IK

When baked clips are insufficient — feet must land on uneven terrain, hands must grip a moving weapon, or animation must transfer between different skeletons — reach for Unreal's procedural animation suite: Control Rig, the IK Rig, and the IK Retargeter. Both systems are plugins that extend the core animation system (animation-system).

When to use this skill

• Foot/leg placement on uneven terrain, stairs, or slopes (foot IK, pelvis adjustment).
• Hand/weapon IK, two-handed grips, look-at or aim offsets.
• Procedural secondary motion, runtime pose corrections, or physics-driven adjustments.
• Retargeting an animation library from one character skeleton to another at import time (offline) or at runtime via FAnimNode_RetargetPoseFromMesh.
• Authoring a Control Rig asset for Sequencer cinematics or building a custom rig in C++.

The tools — pick by problem