I’ve done a lot of creatures, It’s time to do a nice acting piece and really leverage the power of what ragdoll can do to push a performance …
Animating the jaw will effect the whole body a bit, for example.
All good performances come for a cool character and for this I’m starting from the ground up - Concept all the way to final on the forum .
The model is almost done 
Got a first pass of clothes, groom and textures done I bit more refining and onto the rig and the good stuff !
Hair and beard were done in quill.
Rough Uv set Nothing fancy .
I use : 3D Cut and Sew UV Tool to cut the geo into squares.
Once that’s done I use : Unfold
Texture in Mudbox
Bring it all back into maya, Import the hair and assign the textures .
Ok part of the rigging, just a joint layout for now to test the dynamics and the characters proportions .
After doing this quick pass, I noticed I could get some movement in the nose and adding some markers for the beard/mustache maybe even the hair could look really nice,
Here’s the rough joint motion input
Here’s the sim .
Rigged him up today, trying to keep the rig simple and flexible.
Next steps :
Pose Damping value will go and will pump up the Pose Stiffness
Still need to model a mug , table and rough backdrop .
More to come !
This looks great! In the previous version, the hand looks like it rubs the cheek. Are the cheeks also being simmed?
They can be. I’m planning on doing a jiggle pass after I nail down a performance. Just need to add a joint to each cheek, and turn them into markers, selecting the head then each cheek and do Assign and Connect so it will move with the head.
This is looking nice!
I like the idea of him drunk on the bar.!
hey, admirable work going from concept up to RIG and animation.!
Here’s showing the animation input- I’d say I’m still at a blocking stage with this and can keep on refining. What I find great is not only is the simulation fixing a lot of things but it’s also informing some of my decision making when I’m blocking.
I’m going to animate an actual Dialog with this character next.
So friggin’ cool. I kept trying to get the fingers to work on my end with fast motions, but it kept breaking. Increasing the Steps did it for me, though by then I had already hand-keyed the animation 
Next time, Gadget…
I just want to say, on top of how impressive this all is, what a nice touch the Ragdoll logo tattoo on his shoulder is. 
I just noticed this myself haha, nice touch indeed. 
Thanks! next time 
was it just trying to manage the fast motions that held you up?
Hahahaha! thanks! I couldn’t NOT put that Tat in
Hey everyone I recorded some audio this morning and pumped this out.
There is still room for improvement but how fast you can block out an idea/ concept and have it look good keeps blowing my mind.
The only time I adjusted any parameters in this piece was when he started moving fast - I upped the pose Stiffness in the main body and arm groups.
Going to clean up this rig for you guys and save it here tomorrow would be awesome to see your own animations with it .
This is what I imagine non-industry folks think that “Blocking” might look more like This is fantastic, and LOVE his antic when the large stein hits the table.
As for the fingers you asked about earlier, I was having trouble with the Samples. Your recommendation to place them all into the same Group and increasing the Steps is what I should’ve done to fix it. The hands were just moving way too fast (from the MoCap). It was some arm pumping and cheering.
Looking forward to the next steps on this!
Also, random body weirdness I figured out:
For the life of me, I was only able to do #1 really easily. #'s 2 and 3 were really hard to do concsiously. Because of this, next time I’m presented with this task, I’d place all the fingers AND the hand rotation into the same group, and adjust their Pose Stiffness uniformly.
What were your findings with the fingers??
Glad you liking the progress! Yeah, to get all this kind of detail in would take a few days to get the idea shot down and back to the drawing board, this way of working is very freeing.
With anything going fast it’s all about playing with more strength in both pose and damping- the more damp the more your fingers or sim wants to slow down . SO a value of 0.1 on Damp when something is moving fast is great to keep things under control, but you’ll want to bring those values back to around 1 when things are moving slower as you’d start to get that jittering/ wobbly feel … I’ll do a video an plop it here to show what I mean…
Finger interaction are nice !!! …
well done !
cool!!! keep sharing !!! some of us keep reading and sucking all these tips and info !
Thanks !
HAH! That’s exactly what I had to do: keeping the strength to a high number (80’s, it would break with anything lower than 20) and damp to a VERY low number (0.01, it would break with anything above 0.3) was indeed the only way I got it to work.
However, if the hand was supposed to be flopping a bit more while waving in the air, this would not give me the desired results. I essentially needed the strength to be around 4 and damp to be between 0.8 and 1.2 (with proper limits set on the fingers).
The real magic was when I set the steps in the solver to 12 (Marcus mentioned 8 would be enough, but the hand was moving too fast). This gave me nice floppiness in a fast-moving hand without breaking the sim.
The part I struggled with the most, however, was when the character would put all his weight onto the fingertips (I mentioned this earlier in the Discord). Having them all in the same group would’ve reduced my issue greatly. I needed the stiffness to animate uniformly whenever I wanted to add or remove the weight on the hand+fingers (hence my “floppy fingers + hand” experiment).
Sounds like you doing what I would when things are moving too fast!
Yes for putting weight on small or lighter markers it can get a bit iffy, depending on the shot you could make the fingers heavier then the hand.