Procedual driven animations / Move from Unity to UE

Hello new community :),

after Unity has disappointed me in terms of reliability and price policy with new “packages” and a lot of other things (Substance etc.) :(. I am here now :wink: and hope to be in an engine and a coomunity which I can rely on and support myself in the future.
These are not my first steps in Unreal but it is a while.

I need to setup a procedual animation system in Unreal like:
[video]https://twitter.com/i/status/1106656485495451648[/video]

But I dont know where to start. The C++ documentation in unreal is not so advanced in this direction or this is only my perspective.
I have seen the new Control Rig package which sounds promising.

Can someone with expirience in this direction can give me some hints where I should enter to archive this.

Please only C++. I know alot of people like Blueprint-Node-Trees, but I dont like them when someone is trying to archive a more andvanced system with it and it results in logic chains which are not clearly devided anymore. So please dont post Blueprint-Pictures.

Besides control rig, there are new inverse kinematic nodes for animation blueprints for this kind of thing.

It’s not possible to work with animations without stepping into blueprint land, the farther you’ll get is creating your anim BP classes in c++ and custom nodes to do your algorithms, but at least dropping your custom nodes written in c++ onto an anim graph you are required to do.

A custom skeletal animation based node (FAnimNode_SkeletalControlBase) combined with a custom animation instance (UAnimInstance) would allow most everything I’d imagine.