How would one go about making a component of a player character move with the player’s view?
There are multiple ways to do it but basically you want to find something thats relevant to the players view (control rotation, camera rotation, actor rotation) in this case i would probably suggest camera rotation then attach it to whatever you need. You could also make your own mouseX and mouseY variables and have them linked to mouse movement and subsequently driving your component to move (ive done this before to make a character move between blend spaces; it works fairly well but ultimately it comes down to what you are trying to do).
Once you have a variable being driven you then would go into your animation blueprint and add either a bone transform or a bone IK (these arent their exact names but they should come up if you type it into the search bar), tell it which bone/bone chain you want to transform and then link your variables to it.
Some more specific detail could be helpful (what exactly you are trying to move and in what manner) if this doesnt give you what you need.
I guess very few people have insight regarding this issue.
It shouldnt be too difficult; I cant tell you off the top of my head how to do it but i think there is a node that converts screen space coordinates into world space, so you could use that to get the mouse position in world space and have the player drag it around with the mouse.
As for attaching an invisible component; you can add a socket to your skeleton which can be linked to any bone in it , so if you wanted something to be where you are looking you just attach it to the head bone, move it to where you want it to be then tie the camera motion with the head motion; this should be incredibly easy (not sure if i explained it very well though).
Also you could have the ray trace run every frame rather than just call it for one frame (im assuming you have it going on a button press or something?).
I would probably recommend attaching a socket to your characters head and using its position to determine where you are looking for items and for line of sight triggers probably stick with the ray trace as its range is much more dynamic than what the socket will be.