I wanted to play with Unreal Engine rigging for so long and therefore have finally have made some time to explore this. It’s a game engine and I had to treat it as such.
In Unreal there is a Construction Event node and then there is the Forward Solve that does the same thing, I got confused and so I’ve looked it up:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-actor-lifecycle?application_version=5.4
Construction event is initializing the components and Forward Solve is activated on the Being Play application. Okay!
Knowing this, I’ve moved forward into crafting a simple FK Control Rig that has IKTwoBone and IKThreeBone, and BasicIK nodes to manipulate the legs puppetry. The real trick was figuring out the IK Pole Vectors by matching the the correct axes and you do this by first knowing what the original vector axes are for the bone and comparing that against the created IK Pole Vector control node. I put that information inside the Primary Axis and it works!
I’ve created a five minute video of my rigging process. Updating the mesh is as straightforward as it gets inside Unreal! Just replace the Skeletal Mesh inside “Preview Mesh” in the Control Rig. Wow!