I’m having an issue with Ragdoll when simulating markers that are constrained to muscles. During live preview and playback, the markers behave correctly and follow the muscle motion as expected. However, once I run the simulation or record the markers, they suddenly move far away and their transform values become extremely large, often ending up as NaN. This only happens after the simulation/record step, not during preview.
Any insight into what might cause this or how to avoid NaN transforms in this setup would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
To better understand your situation, a screenshot or video would help a lot. You can paste a screenshot or drag-n-drop a video here to upload it. If not, then opening a new scene and creating something minimal, like a box, and assigning to this to try and record would help clarify whether it is something specific to that one scene or general to Maya and/or Ragdoll.
Until then, to try and debug this on your end, have a look here for some ideas.
I actually had to start over, since Maya kept crashing and I’m pretty sure I messed something up in that scene. That’s fine though, as I wanted to rebuild the setup more cleanly anyway. Sorry for switching up the topic.
Jason shows a method of blocking out the character using deform and shrinkwrap, and around the 38-minute mark he mentions remeshing the result to use it for Ragdoll simulation. I’m not entirely sure what the intended remeshing step is here. Do I need to cut the rig mesh into smaller pieces and attach markers to those, or is there a specific remesh workflow or tool I should be using instead?
I’ll also attach a short video of my current setup to better show the issue. Thanks again for your time and help.
I followed the suggested workflow and used Ragdoll → Utilities → Extract Simulation. The extracted joint hierarchy animates correctly on its own. However, when I manually parent-constrain a single membrane/finger controller to one of the extracted joints, the control stretches heavily and moves far away from its expected position.
At this point, it’s just a normal Maya joint and Parent Constraint. There is little Ragdoll does or can do. Could the controls already be constrained to something? Are you able to keyframe them? If you manually put them on an animation layer, does it still explode?
Each Marker can be a basic shape, like a capsule, or a Maya mesh. Ragdoll isn’t involved in authoring this mesh, but I think what Jason did here was to take a Maya box or sphere, and using the Maya shrinkwrap deformer to fit it into the shape of the dragon and then potentially the Maya remesh to reduce/adjust the polycount of it. There are many ways to go about it, I tend to just cut up the original mesh and call it a day.