Max Rose

At the moment I'm not aware of any available APEX quadruped rigs in the wild, but the current tools and tutorials will get you 90% of the way there. And yes, following Maya tutorials can help fill in the gaps.

I hear this question quite often, so I'll try to get something up onto the content library in the near future.

Upload the character if you get a chance, it'll make it easier to debug what's going on.

You can set the initial pose on your guide skeleton using a Rig Pose. So if you have three inputs going into your packfolder (Base.shp, Base.skel, Guides.skel), you'd set the rest on the guide, while leaving the Base.skel untouched. Once you create the fkTransform autorig component, the rig will snap to the position you created outside the packfolder.