Closely follow the character

Help
1

I’m have a snake rig in Maya, and I’m trying use Ragdoll to find a way to make the snake closely follow the character body. I wanted to kindly ask if you have any advice on this?Your guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance.

my attempt

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Hey @Ting, thanks for posting this outside of private chat.

First things first, what does the input animation look like, without Ragdoll? For it to follow the animation, I assume you want your animation to follow that curve? Does it?

If so, then generally try increasing Rotate Stiffness on either every Marker, or on the group that contains all Markers. And lower the damping. To values such as:

  • Rotate Stiffness: 10-100
  • Rotate Damping: 0.1-0.01

Here are some more resources I found while searching the forum.

Let me know if it helps, and post any attempts you make so we can investigate further.

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thanks,marcus!
After some attempts, it seems to have improved, but new issues have arisen. When I Record Markers, everything becomes a mess.

only animation


Ragdoll

Record Markers

1 Like
4

Great work presenting your work, this is how it’s done!

Only one thing missing to determine what the cause might be; what are you recording onto? I suspect you’ve got joints driven by Spline IK, and you are attempting to record onto those joints. You’ll need to decide whether you want your joints driven by Spline IK, or keyframes. Think of Ragdoll as the animator. What would the animator keyframe in order to move the snake? Probably not those joints. Probably some animation control, that drives the underlying Spline IK NURBS curve. That’s what Ragdoll needs. You can assign to those joints, as you want Ragdoll to follow the final joints. But recording should happen on the same controls that the animator would use.

See the retargeting section here for details on how to do that.

This is all assuming you do record to joints, so let me know if this isn’t the case!

5

Thank you so much!! Is work

I have a new question,sometimes,it will twine,or the snake belly won’t adhere closely to the skin，how to fix that.

擷取
擷取2

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BTW,I fix Record Markers problem is see this video.

Live Mode Compatibility Workaround

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Not sure I understand; do you mean that the rig used to deform the skin will flip the skin? Or do you mean that the recorded Markers will flip?

You can try the Ragdoll → Utilities → Extract Simulation option to see what is coming out of Ragdoll. Is the orientation correct there?

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nice !!!

Almost there !!!

  • If you are using spline IK, then… you can switch IK ON - OFF … using the cache option you could Cache, switch off the IK blend and then Record the animation to avoide the double transformation.

or You could use external Work bake controls to extract the transformations and reverse back the motion…

Heads up , dependeing on how the RIG was done, the 180 degree flips will occur no matter how hard you try… But Ragdoll probably can take care of that.

SO to Sumarize:

  • get you markers animation in good shape…
  • Cache the anim
  • Switch IK to OFF
  • Record the anim…

This is a project I did… and I have it parked waiting for me to Demo and break it up to explain better

Practice that on passes and let us know how it goes

Cheers !