First of all, thank you so much Jason for your presentation to Dneg today! As I mentioned, I have a few questions and queries, so thought I’d try to get into the forum. So… hi!
My first query is about an issue I keep getting where my ragdoll puppet’s limbs break free / fly off quite frequently. I recently created a set-up with fingers and am finding them even more susceptible to this, even on quite soft impacts. Is there a specific setting I should be keeping an eye on to help keep things locked together?
Hi Ben! I had the exact same issue, had a character cheering and fist pumping into the air, and the fingers would explode every time. Try increasing the Substeps. I had to raise mine up to 12.
Here’s a post explaining what Substeps and Iterations do:
Increasing substeps can solve issues where the solver isn’t given enough time to solve. The more complex the setup, the more time it’ll need and fingers is a good example of where the default substeps won’t cut it.
But there may be other solutions that don’t require sacrificing that CPU performance. If you are able to reproduce the issue in a fresh scene that you can share a video of, that would help understanding the problem better and give better advice as to how to best approach it.
That said, these defaults were established at a time when Ragdoll was about 100x less performant than it is today, so increasing these defaults from 4 to something like 8 or 12 might not be a bad idea. It would mean defaults that are well suited for any complexity, and that performance could instead be boosted by lowering these values once performance actually become an issue.
This also sounds like it could be related to collisions, I find the more complex I go the more I’m grouping trouble areas ( parts of the character that have many markers) and grouping them and keeping the group to have no collisions)
You could do a test, select all the markers
And make them all not collide
If it still exploded after that it might be a limits issue…
@marcus - Yep, here’s a vid with the issue I was having before tweaking the substeps. This has the default settings for the most part, so should give you an idea what might be happening…
But actually @Jason , it actually occurred to me to divide them up into groups (after your awesome presentation) just to give them a greater stiffness and damping. This helped too. I’ve since been playing with the collisions turned off, as you suggested, and they’re pretty indestructible now!
Thank you both so much; for the replies, for developing and releasing this wonderful tool in the first place, and for being so incredibly present and communicative to the user-base. Kudos to you, gents!
