My backstory is I’m originally a rigging artist, been working professionally for many years. I rig in Maya. My usual workflow is binding geometry in A-pose, rigging it in T-pose. T-pose just makes things like pole vector calculations that much easier, plus overall you get ‘cleaner’ transforms for the IK controls themselves. Most of the animators I’ve worked with prefer it rigged that way, too.
I am forever curious about rigging in Unreal, because I can see the appeal and the potential. Currently, if I want to modify animations of non-standard UE characters (meaning, different skeletons, so cannot utilize the default manny control rig), I retarget animations onto my skeleton first, export that as an fbx, I have some scripts handy to apply the exported anims back onto my control rig in Maya, I modify the animation, re-export.
Using a UE control rig, I could avoid that mess altogether, and adjust the animation directly in Unreal.
However, simple things like putting the character in T-pose seem tricky. I can see we can have Rig Pose. You cannot really assign an animation or a ‘classic’ pose asset to it, so what was the intended workflow (I’ve read Pose Caching documentation and didn’t find anything useful there for this case)? I can assign my T-pose in the preview animation window, and then do a Get Pose Cache and Set my pose in Construction event. Okay, cool. But then how do I apply those bones transforms back onto the controls as I need the controls to also be ‘zeroed out’ and become T-posed? I’ve tried setting transforms of the controls with Initial checked/unchecked in the construction event, it doesn’t matter, they stay in their A-pose. You should be able to query that starting pose and when you create the controls, they should by default be created with that starting pose in mind. I also don’t really like the fact I’m querying the pose from the Animation preview, which makes me think it’s not permanent, and it’s not how it should be used.
So, documentation seems limited, and even YouTube is not of much help. The best channel I’ve found so far is from Kamila Bianchi, she has a full tutorial on a humanoid rig, however, that one is already T-posed. I’m using 5.3, and I’m aware they have set up some modular parts in 5.4/5.5(?), and that doesn’t solve anything for what I’m trying to do either. Does anyone have any tutorials they like? Or any suggestions for the T-pose issue?