It is a spherical render video for a little VR project I am working on. The pilot movements come from rokoko suit, cleaned and treated with Ragdoll plugin later on. I am quite unexperienced in the plugin, so it was very limited treatment at the moment:
After some learning, my next shots will be more Ragdoll driven, but I have some problems with moving the fbx skeleton to maya and creating a RD representation with markers. I will ask for help if a precise problem occurs. Anyway, thanks for the awesome product… sincerely, your happy customer.
Thanks for sharing, and welcome to the forums! Would it be possible to share a video of what the Markers looks like too? Always great to see under the hood.
Sure, but I think I will upload the new iteration of the full-body marker setup, because the first ones were very limited and unattractive (mostly fingers and hand interaction with stick, not very visible from this camera anyway). Learning newest 3.0 features now and preparing the fbx to be correctly imported for the plugin.
After some painful days about moving the fbx from Mobu to Maya in proper scale, I’ve managed to prepare the scene for ragdolling. My case is the same as in “Mocap Chap” tutorial, which I already memorized in my head.
During the export chore I discovered one problem. When exporting (from MoBu) same skeleton but with “Control Rig” attached on, then maya intakes the whole skeleton-rig very well. Now, the nice yellow bones and red spheres as IK controllers are great in general, but if you try to make any ragdoll markers along such a Human IK rig, you instantly crash the app to desktop. I can provide a scene for reproducing the problem.
So the only solution was unchecking “Include Control Rig” option when exporting from MoBu. Then you get clean simple bones without string attached.
As terrible as Human IK is, it shouldn’t crash. Yes, if you can share a reproducible, that would be fantastic.
Other than that, I’d ensure your Markers fit the character for the most realistic result. From your screenshot, your character would act like a broom with a heavy head up top. With a smaller (and thereby lighter) head, it’ll act much better.
I try to make every part of the body (bone) a correct marker. But after saving of my recent progress, maya crashes on scene load. I can open the earlier stage without problem, but the further one (where I adjusted some marker sizes and so on) crashes. I attach both for you to investigate. Quite irritating to be honest - a hidden bomb feeling.
Heya, do you remember what you did between the two scenes? Try temporarily removing the ragdoll plug-in and load the scene to test whether the problem is related. Also try opening the scene with Maya evaluation “paused”, using that little pause button at the top of the Maya ui. It’ll keep Ragdoll from rendering and evaluating which can also provide a clue. And finally, you can try loading Maya in legacy OpenGL if possible, that will also prevent Ragdoll from evaluating.
@davidlatwe sorry to say, but the scene cannot be opened due to crash to desktop, so no resaving in different format is currently possible
Btw. Why people use ma format?
@marcus good news for you, bad news for me - after removing ragdoll from plugin load list and restarting maya, the file still does CTD. So i assume it’s something about Human IK or god knows what is responsible. I will revert back to several scenes before and try again, this time constantly testing every save if it is corrupted or not.
@davidlatwe@marcus I’ve reuploaded working file from some days ago. Could you look up on it and point out anything that may cause problems in the future? I mean scene scaling, rigging, making markers on control rig or on the bones, etc. the skinned mesh is proxy one, it stretches unnaturally bc it is designed to seated position, not a T-pose ever. Anyways, some Mocap’d T-pose is present at the starting frame (165).
Sorry if this is too much - I am pretty new in maya (only for ragdoll plugin, to be honest) so sometimes simple things can make everything go sideways.
I was lucky enough (1 out of 10 crash) to catch some error log when Maya 2023 and 2022 crashing from opening pilot-startup-imported-ragdolling.0002.mb. The log indicates the crash was from Maya internal operation related to NURBS curve and memory.
And then somehow I was able to open the scene pilot-startup-imported-ragdolling.0002.mb, so I saved them as Maya ASCII .ma file while I can.
Now with that scene opened and the clue from error log, I also saved another file with all those lollipop NURBS removed, as pilot-startup-imported-ragdolling.0002_cleaned.ma for you to try out.
I also saved pilot-into-cockpit-WITH IK CONTROL RIG.mb as ASCII format.
It’s really hard to say or predict what kind of action may cause problem. But what we can do is, for example, to save working versions constantly, and save them in ASCII format (.ma), because that format is better for debugging and recovering. And save the workfile as Binary format (.mb) when the work is done and ready for rendering.
Maya ASCII file is a bit slower to open but since it’s bascically a text file which means it’s human readable (hard, but still doable) so that format has a better chance than Binary format when you got in trouble while your work is still developing.
Here’s the scene that I saved and uploaded to Google Drive, hope these helps!
Thanks for asking, marcus. This week I am going to record my pilot’s ragdoll, the physics is almost set up. I will let you know if any problems occur when recording motion into the original bones. Should I create a new Topic then or continue within this one?
Still creating the best workflow to use Rokoko suit mocap corrected with ragdoll. Currently I struggle with a certain problem - The ragdoll markers never align themselves exactly covering the bones in the dynamic mode (see hands and fingers) - no matter what settings. Even when the hand is in the resting on the dashboard (no forces applied in mocap at the frame). Kinematic is correct, but even the hardest join cant get you exactly where it should be. Am I doing something wrong?
Would it be possible to share a video of what the Markers looks like too? Always great to see under the hood. 
