I just noticed this myself haha, nice touch indeed. 
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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
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DIALOG !!
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 .
MORE TO COME!
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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:
- Flop your hand around really fast with loose fingers, you’ll see some fun flopping.
- Now, try flopping your hand really fast while keeping your fingers stiff.
- And then, try flopping your fingers really fast while keeping your hand stiff.
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??
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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…
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Finger interaction are nice !!! …
well done !
cool!!! keep sharing !!! some of us keep reading and sucking all these tips and info !
Thanks !
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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.
Just animating the Jaw and Hand here :
… I could have probably pipped in the waveform into the rotation of the jaw… hmmm…
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Haha, I love this. 
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Hands?
Yes hands and fingers!
I’ve put some distance constraints between the knuckles to keep things a bit more glued together.
I think I might do one more acting piece tomorrow with this guys with the improved fingers/ hand and save the new rig here then. Just wanted to make sure the hands were working well before uploading .
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THE RIG, for all the play with!
Have fun and please share if you use this to make any cool performances
Download
pirate.zip (7.6 MB)
Usage Video
You should find:
- Pirate rig
- Mug rig
- Textures
Happy simulation!
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Gah, so flippin’ cool… Thank you for sharing
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Awesome work yet again @Jason !
Now, and I feel like I’ve asked for this before, but is there going to be a tutorial for setting up this guy in Ragdoll? (I’m in the process of watching the latest Live Stream but that appears to be only animation, which of course is still highly valuable )
This appears to be the closest character representing production work so it would be invaluable to see Ragdoll construction including the how you came upon the values you and how you tested, and any control rig specifics you utilized to enhance Ragdoll performance (acting, not speed ‘performance’).
As always thank you!
-Steven
EDIT: Also, in creating the custom Mesh Shapes for the entire body, did you use Automatic Mesh Islands or did you create bespoke hulls yourself?
It would be awfully similar to the existing tutorials on the Manikin, there is nothing new here in terms of character setup, except more use of Replace Mesh and also including some fingers.
You can inspect the character and setup for yourself too, the link to download it is right above your post. 
Yea well, be that as it may, the point would be to replicate a quality character setup. Manikin 1 is functionally fine, but clearly @Jason spent a lot of time massaging the Pirate to perform as he needed, including introducing Distance constraints on the fingers which wasn’t explained as to why that was necessary. Also the Mesh Shapes I asked about…bespoke or using the new tool you ‘just’ introduced?
So perhaps it would be similar to Manikin 1, but it would be far more mature and represent a production quality asset that Manikin 1 simply does not.
I clearly support the tool and want to see it succeed and grow, so I imagined you would want to constantly improve the education for it. I learned the tool just fine as evidenced by our chats on Discord, but the reason I suggest a tutorial here is to expedite past the 101’s and start thinking of executing with Ragdoll on a production level. Tinkering, theory and concept are fine but application is invaluable.
Hi Steve,
You bring up some good points, I think an in depth look at a good hand setup is for sure something I could do, The distance constraints were there acting as tissue holding together the bones, without them having a loose pose strength would cause the hand to splay open . Rather than pumping up the pose strength value to try hold them together I thought using distance constraints felt like a more elegant solution.
Heya Jason and yea that makes sense…I think.
So then why use the Distance Constraints on the fingers and not any other joint? Perhaps because there would be greater stresses from interlocking the fingers?
Also, I didn’t notice any angle limits on any other joint but the metacarpals; I would reason to create realistic limits on a given joint. Is it safe to assume you didn’t find the need since you were driving most of the performance from the control rig and wanted to have ‘wiggle’ room for poses or did you feel it wasn’t necessary? I’d assume then that the hands used limits so they wouldn’t shear apart?
Lastly (I think I bury this question in each of my posts as it seems to be overlooked each time lol)…
…did you create bespoke hulls for the collision shapes or did you use Ragdoll Auto Mesh Islands to create them?
Thanks man!!
-Steven