IK Rig in Animation Blueprints in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.5 Documentation

Once your IK Rig is created, you can reference it within Animation Blueprints to use its IK behavior in gameplay.

This document provides an overview of this process, and the various features available to you.

Prerequisites

You have created an IK Rig for a Skeletal Mesh. Refer to the IK Rig Editor page for example setup instructions.
Your Skeletal Mesh has an Animation Blueprint, which the Third Person Template project provides if you do not have one.
You have a basic understanding of using Animation Blueprints.

Setup

IK Rigs are referenced in Animation Blueprints from the AnimGraph panel. Right-click in the graph and select IK Rig from the Misc category to create an IK Rig node.

Once added, you will need to assign your IK Rig to the Rig Definition Asset property in the Details panel.

In common setups the IK Rig node is placed after most of your locomotion and other AnimBP logic. This is so that IK adjustments can occur correctly in sequence after other effects.

Usage

By default the IK Rig will not cause any change in your animation pose. In order to affect IK changes from the node you need to expose an IK Goal's position, rotation, or both.

To do this, select an IK Goal in the IK Rig editor and enable Expose Position and Expose Rotation in the Details panel. This will add pins for that goal's position or rotation on the IK Rig node, and expose the goal for manipulation.

From here you can create Variables for these properties and build logic that manipulates your IK Rig.

You can test the behavior of the IK Rig in the Animation Blueprint by adjusting either the Goal Position or Rotation pin values.

Editing the Position / Rotation Alpha will blend the IK effect on/off for that goal on the respective axis.

Properties

Selecting the IK Rig node reveals the following IK Rig-specific properties in the Details panel:

Name	Description
Goals	The property section will populate for each IK Goal that is exposed, and provide you with additional settings to control its behavior. You can specify a goal to be one of the following types: Manual Input, which exposes the Position and Rotation pins on the node for manual control of the goal's transform. You can also choose the position or rotation space that is applied to the goal: Additive, which treats the goal transform as a world-space additive offset relative to the to the Bone at the effector. Component, which treats the goal transform as being in the space of the Skeletal Mesh Actor Component. World, which treats the goal transform as being in world space. Bone, where you can specify a Bone within this skeleton for the goal to snap to. This can be useful when using auxiliary Bones, like weapon or prop Bones, which may procedurally adjust.
Rig Definition Asset	The IK Rig Asset to modify the incoming pose.
Start from Ref Pose	Enabling this ignores the incoming pose and instead starts the solve using the Skeletal Mesh reference pose.
Enable Debug Draw	This enables the visibility of all IK Goals within the Viewport for debugging and preview.
Debug Scale	Increases or decreases the scale of the IK Rig debug draw, if Enable Debug Draw is enabled.