Characters in a car; reacting to terrain while driving

Tips and Tricks
1

Hi, could you take me through your steps in creating the scene with the two character in a car talking, and while the body is reacting to the terrain the car is driving over. Cheers.J.

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Thanks for asking this @JGalip, and welcome to the forums! :partying_face: I’ll whip something up for you, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for the longest time anyway.

Here’s the example in question.

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3

Allright, the original scene was made using a pre-alpha version of Ragdoll, and things have changed slightly since then.

Here’s an updated version you can play with. :blush:

cardemo1_export.zip (1.6 MB)

A few things I found.

  1. Car is Kinematic, that way I could preserve the relationship between between steering wheel and seats. The seat could be made dynamic and pinned also, for some additional softness to it.
  2. Both hips have pinned rotations, such that they can still sit on the seat, but not fall over as easily.
  3. The pins are parented to the seat, such that they follow the animation and stay oriented with the seat
  4. Hands are Distance Constrainted to the steering wheel. Could also use a Weld Constraint, but then you’d lose out on that nice hand rotation as the wheel turns.

And that’s pretty much it! Let me know if you have any more questions, and have fun! :partying_face:

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4

Revisiting this, I dug up the old scene and the old Ragdoll version, stripped away all of the old Ragdoll nodes and saved out the scene in its original - non simulated - format for your viewing pleasure.

ragdoll_example8_driving_nophysics.zip (32.1 KB)

There’s no special sauce in there, it used to be rather challenging to make a scene like this back in 2021. Today it’d be a few mere clicks away. :blush:

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