Marker making ragdoll flip out

Hi Marcus,

hope things are well. I’m having an issue whereby one or two of the markers on a hand on a human character are making the whole character ‘spaz’ out. Not sure what it is. Turning collions off on those markers doesn’t seem to help or do anything. Any ideas at all?

Actually, I found out what it was. For some reason, setting the finger markers to locked in some axis was making it flip out for some reason. I’m not sure what the difference is between locked and off to be quite honest?

Good to hear from you again @gang, been a while, and glad you managed to solve it.

I assume you are referring to locking of limits, where Off is what you see in the Manipulator UI? In the Channel Box, that would equate to Limit Range = -1

Every Marker has 3 axes of rotation, these are unlimited per default, meaning they can rotate around X, Y and Z freely.

As you enable limits, they will default to a 45 degree permitted angle relative their initial orientation.

As you lock axes, the Marker is no longer free to rotate around that axis and would enforce to a rotation value of 0.

0 in terms of limits means the initial angle the control had at the time of assigning, unless it had been manually changed via the Manipulator - by holding Ctrl and modifying a limit asymmetrically.

If you control starts at a value other than 0, then you might experience some “spazzing” due to Ragdoll trying to “fix” that angle and bring it back to 0.

In your case, it sounds like Ragdoll isn’t fixing it, but rather breaking it. So one solution is to simply disable limits, as you have. But if you did want to still lock certain axes - which is common for elbows and fingers - you’d need to somehow tell Ragdoll what 0 means.

The simplest (and default) is to let whatever angle the fingers are in initially be the new 0. This is what Ragdoll does when first assigning, but changes as you modify those limits.

You can reset that assumption via Ragdoll → Utilities → Reset Constraint Frames.

Now this angle will be the new zero, and is what locking of limits will try to enforce in simulation.