Hi. Does Unreal Engine have it’s own rigging tool or Maya has some kind of patent that other engines cannot just create their own rigging tool for skeletons and animation for it?
Does it mean even if Unreal Engine is free one still needs to buy and learn a 1000 dollar Maya software?
Thank you. God bless. Rev. 21:4
you don’t need maya to rig and animate your stuff for UE4, you can do it in almost any 3D app (maya//C4d/Blender…ect), there is a rigging toolkit for maya that was made by epic staff because they use maya quite a lot but you don’t have to use it.
hope that helps:)
Get blender, it’s free. But you get what you pay for. Blender is great but the Maya pipeline has been optimized by Epic because it’s what they use and it’s very easy to use. Blender has a bit of a steeper learning curve but you can absolutely get everything done that you want with it.
You cant create a rigg in the UE4, but you can create simple animations in the editor -> open the skeletal mesh - click on the record button - move the bones - save it 
But it’s better when you use a 3d program like blender
Do you know that you can use the student version of all kind of autodesk products (, maya, motion builder, mudbox…etc) for free. And functionally there is no difference between the student and commercial version. The only restriction is you can not use it commercially. As all your game assets will be imported to the game engine, you do not even have to think about it.
I do not know about the rigging system of unreal, but the rigging systems in or maya are great. And if you use 3ds 's CAT system, it will make things more easy. And retergeting in motion builder is a matter of few clicks. So, you can try this products and make your work easy.