I was just wondering what the best practice would be to setup a shot like this. I am currently animating a personal shot which involves a 1st person rig , driving in a car down an environment. Instead of hand keying a lot of noise on the car global controller and having a motion path, I thought it would be a fun experiment to start learning ragdoll.
However I have run into a few problems with IK arms / legs and constraints. I have got the environment into maya and set it up as a ragdoll environment. If I make some basic geometry and let it drop from a height it now interacts with it.
I have assigned a marker to the global car control and just animated it linearly moving forward in a test scene. I set that marker to Kinematic. I then pinned the seat to that marker and made it dynamic. The seat moves successfully along with the car. I started trying to add markers for my First person rig and I managed to get the Hips pinned to the seat . I then pinned the wheel to seat and that all seems to work
The problem comes when I try to setup a character especially IK arms and legs and Distance constrain them to my wheel I get this weird breaking of the markers on the arms and also the constraint doesn’t hold (it most probably is me being stupid).
I have seen the documentation on setting up markers but wondered if there was a video better explaining it for example how the markers were setup for the pirate rig as it looks like a 1to1 copy of the mesh. I have also run into other problems with this for example if I was trying to simulate a hit reaction or something hitting a character rig I have had a lot of issues with that rig break - the head translating to far or the chest etc. I am 99% sure it is because I am going about setting up markers in the wrong way.
My last question is also about best practice for setting up a simple ragdoll for a rope sim - if i want something to dangle from the wing mirror for example . I have a joint in the wing mirror I wondered if I need to rig something further and skin it or if I can do it in a simpler way.
Sorry for the long post and probably daft questions and if more information is needed happy to provide
Ik and Ragdoll can get a bit complex, Since the Ik ctrl and Ik handle are just objects floating in space effecting a Joint hierarchy when they move. Turning those controls into ragdoll will look at those controls initial position and try make a connected hierarchy between them, however as soon as you move those controls it will break that hierarchy. Ragdoll looks mainly at rotations as an input to the markers. It’s best to create your markers based on the joints and retarget onto controls or create them based on FK controls
Thank you for the reply. Will get right on it and give it all a whirl. Once I have that sorted would it be possible to come back and talk about how you would go about setting up an air freshener or something dangling from the wing mirror. I could just rig it with a simple FK chain and skin it and animate it the normal way but wondered if there was any other smarter way with ragdoll. (excuse my beautiful paint skills)
I totally didn’t realise about the parenting of markers in ragdoll I thought the pin constraint worked in a similar fashion to default parent constraining with maintaining offset. Now i feel silly
Will give everything a go today when i get onto the computer. Sorry about all the daft questions. Happy to provide the rig and the steps taken. I was going to give the fk arms a whirl today. I did try to assign markers to the IK joints rather than controls but still ran into issues following on from the videos. Will go back over them today. I think my main issue with the arms sticking to the wheel was i was distance constraining but forgetting to parent after
Thank you for all the help above guys i appreciate the patience and support
