General animation workflow + additional questions

[fin150]

Hey! this is super cool! I have been wishing for a proper ragdoll solution for blender for a long time, and this seems amazing!

But even more, it seems like its meant for general animation workflow as well, and i have a few questions about that.

I work with Motion Capture a lot, and feel i would want the rag doll simulation to only come into effect at a certain point.

Lets say i have a 20 second walk, and i want the character to fall, or get blown up, or just generally go ragdoll at the end, can you tell the simulation to start at the? and it will just take the existing pose, and go from there? or does it have to start the simulation from the BEGINING of the timeline?

I also see you almost, reverse posing with the ragdoll, and having it move the rig. is this just for poses, or is it also for animation?

This feels very similar to Cascadeur, what is the major difference between your two systems? from what i can gather, yours is simulated actual collisions, while theirs is trained on AI poses, to land in organic poses, and apply auto physics after.

Both end up at natural poses, but they get there seemingly different ways, right?

Either way, this is very interesting, and I’m very optimistic about this addon, and may pick it up.

If i buy the $100 “indie” version, and later want to buy the full $200 version, is there a reduced “upgrade” price of just paying the difference, or will i need to buy a new license for the full version?

Thanks!

[marcus]

Hi @fin150, welcome to the forums! And thanks for the excellent questions, let’s run through theme one-by-one.

@fin150

Lets say i have a 20 second walk, and i want the character to fall, or get blown up, or just generally go ragdoll at the end, can you tell the simulation to start at the? and it will just take the existing pose, and go from there? or does it have to start the simulation from the BEGINING of the timeline?

Yep, this is low hanging fruit for Ragdoll. Each Marker will have a property called “Behaviour” that can be either Animated or Simulated. Keyframe this attribute to go from Animated to Simulated, and it will do exactly this.

Furthermore, all markers part of the same character will have a “group” with the same property, that affects all Markers part of the same group. So you can set keyframes on a single property to achieve this effect.

Here are some related forum posts.

• Recommended way to fling a charscter to a wall? - #2 by marcus
• Animating reaction to blow over existing keyframe animation - #12 by marcus

@fin150

I also see you almost, reverse posing with the ragdoll, and having it move the rig. is this just for poses, or is it also for animation?

It can be used to set poses at any frame, so you can use it to animate. At the moment, it’s possible that you get euler flipping when you do, let us know if that’s the case, we’ve got a cure for this too.

@fin150

This feels very similar to Cascadeur, what is the major difference between your two systems? from what i can gather, yours is simulated actual collisions, while theirs is trained on AI poses, to land in organic poses, and apply auto physics after.

That seems like an apt description, yes.

@fin150

If i buy the $100 “indie” version, and later want to buy the full $200 version, is there a reduced “upgrade” price of just paying the difference, or will i need to buy a new license for the full version?

Yes, you can upgrade from the $99 to the $199, just shoot us an email with your serial and you’ll get a payment link for the difference, licencing@ragdolldynamics.com

@fin150

Thanks!

Our pleasure.