Boricuapab's Lil' Kitty Ragdoll

Hi Ragdoll Peeps,

I’ve downloaded this cute little kitty rig and decided to make a ragdoll with it.

This time too, I’ll be recording and sharing some videos showing my ragdoll workflow.

This first one is just a basic setup, took me 20 mins realtime, so I sped up the video by 2x so it’s not so long.

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Here’s a second video showing the retargetting.

Fantastic, thanks for sharing! This helps not only other users, but also helps us! Seeing how others use the tool helps shed light on things I never thought of, as well as underlines whether the what we imagined for tool usage has come across clearly.

Some things I noticed.

1:40 Lil' Kitty Basic Ragdoll Setup - YouTube

Editing symmetrical box shapes via the channel box. This can be a pain haha. Can I ask why you use the Channel Box here, rather than the Manipulator? The Manipulator would be symmetrical per default and would give you less trouble.

Quick tip here, you can use the normal G hotkey to repeat the last command. That way you can skip 1 click.

With symmetry on, I’m not able to select multiple markers, which is why I often use the Outliner to select multiple markers after disabling the DAG Objects Only checkbox.

Another benefit I’ve found of using the channels and middle mouse dragging the attributes, is that it shows the change onto the markers on both sides of the character immediately, would be great if the Manipulator tool would show the changing values in real-time for all selected markers like using the channel box does.

And when I use the manipulator to modify the Box markers it’s very useful when it comes to modifying the length, width, and height individually as well as uniformly scaling them, but I find it difficult to rotate and move them, because when rotating I can’t really control it as precisely as the maya rotate tool would allow, and the same goes for translating the Box marker as it quickly gets off-center from the joints.

But, maybe I would use it more if there was a similar maya transform manipulator inside the ragdoll manipulator that would allow more precise control to move/rotate box markers, that would be awesome.

I use the channel box because I can middle mouse drag to get more precise values and sometimes even type in the value I want rounding up or down to the closes whole number value.

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True, but I have a one track mind while recording myself that when it came time to untarget some of the markers, the use of G would have thrown me off :slight_smile:

Thanks for this @boricuapab, this turned into an excellent source of feedback.

Here’s another video showing a first and second pass at setting up the limits on all markers for the lil’ kitty.

2 Likes

Thanks for sharing @boricuapab!

Any reason you chose not to enable Self Collisions on this one? Those, along with Stiffness, typically help keep a character in shape and can help reduce the need for limits. Especially around limbs that are more flexible, like the spine and neck. Unlike elbows and knees which almost always needs limits.