Hello all, very glad to be here!
Ragdoll Dynamics is a godsend for me because I’ve been fiddling ‘unpredictable’ systems for a while. I’ve been working on a couple of shorts animated largely through VR puppeteering, so I was over the moon when I realized how well Ragdoll Dynamics integrates with that process. As my whole goal was to get characters to behave, well, more Thunderbirds-y or Muppet-y, the plugin seemed almost to good to be true.
Below is a first, very small-scope test where Ragdoll is mainly used as a ‘floppiness modifier’ for the various recorded animation layers. You can also see the point where I realized I can just make the desk dynamic rather than animate around it - that was an eye-opener!
Anyway, excoyted to be here and see where this great plugin is going!
Welcome to the forums @Ernst-Jan, glad to have you here.
I’m equally excited to see Ragdoll used for puppeteering, as mentioned over email just now, this is the upcoming direction for Ragdoll as well. I’ll throw together some ticks and tricks for you in this thread that I think could help, things I’ve been wanting to experiment with myself for the longest time. Likely in the coming week or two.
In a nutshell, I would experiment with:
Leaving the character in Pose Space = Local
Putting a Pin Constraint on the hip, with the Constrained option to transfer the animation
Seeing where that takes me
It would result in the simulation inheriting the animation in a realistic way, of figuring out how limbs should bend in order to reach a pose, which also responds better to contact with the environment.
As an alternative to the Pin Constraint, you could set the hip to Pose Space = World and fiddle with the Advanced Pose attributes in the Attribute Editor. There’s an attribute to have the hip match your animation only along individual axes, like X and Z. Letting it fall freely and come to rest on the ground. This could potentially also work on the hands, to have them fit the animation but still respond well to contacts and gravity.
Also have to mention @Jason’s recent excursion into puppetry here.
Thank you for the warm welcome! Exciting ideas all - going to try them out this week! Also love Jason’s rabit experiment - one of the things that convinced me to try out the plugin!
I’ve been indulging in a lot of Oculus - or Adobe - Medium the past few months, mainly to quickly bolt puppets together. As a slow modeler it’s been a godsend
