Looking for Guidance on Improving Ragdoll Dynamics to Achieve Realistic Character Motion

[marcus]

Thanks for the thoughtful questions and welcome to Ragdoll I’ll be back from holiday tomorrow to fill in some answers.

Can we start by clarifying whether you are using Ragdoll with Maya or Blender?

@Molly90

I’m experiencing problems determining the best joint and constraint settings to provide natural movement.

An example of what you see here would help narrow things down considerably, anything you could share?

@Molly90

My project necessitates a coexistence of realistic science and performance. Especially in real-time applications, how do you strike a balance between preserving high performance and creating realistic, detailed simulations?

Unclear what you mean. In Maya, Ragdoll runs at well beyond real-time for multiple characters at a time with tons of props and what have you. Performance is not something we struggle with very often.

@Molly90

I’m also combining keyframe animations with Ragdoll Dynamics. Although I’ve seen various instructions, the way the animated and changing states transition still doesn’t entirely satisfy me. What are some tricks for combining these two nicely?

There are 2 very different answers to this depending on the question.

1. Are you transitioning from animation to simulation?
2. Are you transitioning from simulation to animation?

Do a search for “transition” and you’ll find these amongst others.

• https://forums.ragdolldynamics.com/t/animating-reaction-to-blow-over-existing-keyframe-animation/1099/6
• https://forums.ragdolldynamics.com/t/a-fluid-blend-from-kinematic-into-ragdoll/818/2

@Molly90

Do you have any favourite tools or methods for diagnosing and troubleshooting problems with ragdoll simulations in Ragdoll Dynamics?

Needs a lot more details, debugging what exactly? To debug retargeting and recording issues, there’s a very handy Ragdoll → Utilities → Extract Simulation which will let you preview the recording at the 3 different stages it goes through; extract, constrain and bake.

@Molly90

Lastly, I would love to know about any tutorials, documents, or courses that you find very useful in your Ragdoll Dynamics learning.

This is the place. Have a look at the categories on the left-hand side, also see the Learn link at the top of this site.