Raf Anzovin shows off a demo for his in-development ephemeral rigging system for the Unreal Engine.

Animator and Technical Director Raf Anzovin developed the rigging process over the years with a thing he likes to call an ephemeral rig. Starting in Maya, an Ephemeral Riggin system could sit outside the node graph in Maya so that you can reconfigure the rig while animating. Thanks to an Epic Megagrant, Anzovin is creating an Ephemeral Rigging system in Unreal Engine.

Check out the first demonstration of the in-development rigging system for the Unreal Engine.

The Ephemeral System allows for contextual manipulation of a rig, where rig behavior is passed down from selected controls and a few modes and options controlled by the user rather than one created explicitly by a rigging TD.

“The first video focuses on ephemeral posing, and the second on animating with the system.”

With Multi-pose editing, Onion Skins, and blend sliders (such as Breakdown and Bias), the system now supports dense animation data editing, allowing animators to intuitively “sculpt” Motion without the complexity of keyframes, spline interpolation, or a graph editor.

Anzovin hopes to have an early access version available this year.