Today we look at PowerIK for Unreal Engine, a full body IK solver. PowerIK was recently released as part of the December monthly UE giveaways as part of the free forever category. On the Unreal Engine marketplace, PowerIK was described as:
Power IK is a full-body IK solver that lets animators push and pull any skeleton with any number of effectors.
Use Power IK to easily align creatures to uneven terrain, or dynamically modify their pose at run-time. Power IK is a robust and efficient solver that produces remarkably natural poses even under extreme circumstances.
PowerIK has the following features:
- Unique proprietary full-body IK solver
- Power IK Solver AnimGraph node
- Built-in ground alignment
- Power IK Rig Actor Component for making interactive rigs
- Bonus! Procedural animation example blueprints
- Bonus! 6 sample skeletal meshes with fully documented blueprints
While it supports Unreal Engine 4.26, the current install will give you an error when you try to run PowerIK. If this occurs, on Windows the fix is fairly simple. Navigate to your install directory for UE 4.26, then navigate to:
\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\PowerIK\Source\PowerIKRuntime\sdk\lib\Win64
Copy the file POWERIK.DLL. Next paste it to the directory
\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\PowerIK\Binaries\Win64
Now it should work just fine. In the video below we go hands-on with PowerIK using the example project currently available for download here. If you run into some trouble, the documentation is available here.