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> Animating Characters and Objects > Skeletal Mesh Animation System > Animation Node Reference > Skeletal Controls

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Skeletal Controls

Animation nodes that enable direct manipulation and applying solvers to the bones of the target Skelet

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Common Pins and Properties
Component Space
Skeletal Control Nodes

Skeletal Controls (also called SkelControls ) enables direct control of bones within a Skeleton asset. These can be used within Animation Blueprints to control an individual bone, create IK chains, and more. This direct control of the underlying Skeleton provides the ability to create procedural, dynamically-driven animation. The Transform of one bone can be used to drive another, or can be used to conform the feet of a character to the ground while playing a walk animation. Any sort of modification can be used to tweak or completely override the bone transforms applied by Animation Sequences .

Common Pins and Properties

While the properties available will largely be based on the node itself, some pins and properties are common to all SkeletalControls which are outlined below.


Pin	Description
Input Pins
Component Pose	The input pose to be transformed
Alpha	A float value in the range [0.0, 1.0] to use as the alpha value to determine the weighting of the Transform applied by the SkeletalControl. A value of 0.0 gives full weighting to the input pose, while a value of 1.0 gives full weighting to the control's computed Transform.
Output Pins
Pose (Blank)	The final pose after the Transform has been applied


Property	Description
LOD Threshold	This is the max Level of Detail (LOD) that this node is permitted to run on. For example: if you have LOD Threshold set to 2, it will run until LOD 2, but disable itself once the component's LOD becomes 3.

Component Space

Poses can either be in local-space or component-space. The Convert Spaces nodes available in the AnimGraph of Animation Blueprints provides the ability to convert poses between local and component space. Local space assumes the transform of a bone to be relative to its parent bone. Component space assumes the bone's transform to be relative to the SkeletalMeshComponent.

Generally, when working with poses in an Animation Blueprint, they will be in local-space. However, certain blend nodes and all SkeletalControls operate in component-space. This means that the input pose needs to be transformed prior to being passed in to one of these types of nodes. If the input pose is coming from a node that outputs a local space pose, the pose must be converted to the correct space before a SkeletalControl can perform operations on it. After performing the operations, the resulting pose must be converted back to local space to provide input to additional blends or the Result pin.

Because there is a cost associated with each conversion to or from component space, it is best to group any nodes that operate in component-space, such as SkeletalControls, so that they are all performed in a row and limits the number of conversions needed.

See Convert Spaces Nodes for more information on the space conversion nodes.

Skeletal Control Nodes

Below are links to additional pages with information about each of the Skeletal Control Nodes within the AnimGraph.

AnimDynamics

Describes how AnimDynamics can be used to provide physically based secondary animation.

Apply a Percentage of Rotation

Describes how Apply a Percentage of Rotation drives the Rotation of a target bone with a specified percentage of the Rotation of another bone within the Skeleton.

CCDIK

Describes how to access and use the CCDIK Skeletal Control node to set up and control IK chains.

Copy Bone

Describes the Copy Bone node which copies the Transform data or any component of it from one bone to another.

Observe Bone

Describes how you can debug a specified Bone with the Observe Bone node.

Spline IK

Describes how the Spline IK Solver node can be used for controlling character spines or bone chains within Animation Blueprints.

Spring Controller

Describes the Spring Controller which is used to limit how far a bone can stretch from its reference pose before force is applied in the opposite direction.

Trail Controller

Describes how the Trail Controller node can be used affect a chain of bones.

Transform Bone

Describes the Transform Modify Bone control which can be used to modify the transform of a specified bone.

Twist Corrective

Describes how the Twist Corrective control can be used to drive curve values based on the twist of one bone relative to another.

Look At

Describes how the Look At control can be used to specify a bone to trace or follow another bone.

Modify Curve

Describes the Modify Curve node which can be used to modify animation curves with arbitrary logic inside Animation Graphs.

Rigid Body

Describes the Rigid Body node and how it can be used as a lightweight physics simulation inside Animation Blueprints.

Hand IK Retargeting

Describes the Hand IK Retargeting control which can be used to handle retargeting of IK bones.

Two Bone IK

Describes how the Two Bone IK control can be used to apply IK to a 3-joint chain.