It sounds like you got most of it working already. If you’ve already watched all the common tutorials, you probably used a combination of an Animation Blueprint (AnimGraph, state machine), a Trigger Box, and Input setup, which sounds perfectly okay.
One thing that stumped me when I tried something similar is that the PlayAnimation node appears to be buggy. At least, I also was unable to get the character to return to their Animation Graph behavior afterwards.
To work around that, you can do the following:
- create an Animation Montage (for your character skeleton)
- drag your pickup animation into that
- in reaction to the Pickup event, use the Play Anim Montage node instead