Hi there,
Really enjoyed RagdollDynamicsCon2025! Thanks a lot for the other day!
I’m having some issues adding secondary motion to a rider of a mount that is jumping a large distance (~1700 units in z axis) across the scene.
I’ve tried increasing the rGroup stiffness, damping & rSolver scene scale, but am seemingly unable to get a subtle secondary motion. Is there something like inputMeshAttract, or perhaps another setting I could try? 
Thanks again for your time!
Alex
Hey Alex, glad you enjoyed it. 
For large jumps, I’d suggest keyframing the Behaviour attribute to Animated during the move and back to Simulated a frame or two after it has reached its destination. That’ll keep everything locked in place while it moves.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you. A 1700 units long jump, whether that is large or not would depend on the size of your character. How many character-lengths are we talking? 10x? 100x? For how many frames, 1 frame? 100 frames? For any jump 100x the length of a character over 1 frame, I’d imagine subtlety is out the window.
If you are able to throw together a minimal sample scene of what you are facing, maybe witih a few boxes, I expect it would be easier to identify the cause and find a solution.
Hey Marcus!
Thanks for your quick reply and help;
I’ve put together a minimal sample scene;
In a side note, I was wondering if you had considered Behaviour to be a float rather than an enum attr so it could be slowly blended on?
rider_mount_ragdoll.zip (75.6 KB)
Thanks again for your help!
Alex
Thanks, now it makes sense. Here’s a visual for reference.
This is an issue of mass. In general, you should always strive for children to be of equal or lesser weight to their parent. It will give the most expected result, it’s what occurs most often in nature and in this case is what I expect your character is made up of as well; a big torso with a much smaller head. But the Markers doesn’t reflect that, so it gives you this ball-and-chain look instead.
Either giving the torso the proper mesh from your character, or emulating it with larger spheres, and you should find a behaviour closer to what you’d expect.
If your character does have this narrow of a torso (e.g. a cartoony design) then you’ll need to manipulate physics to have it play along. For example, you can decrease the density of the head to force it to be lighter; despite being larger.
Another alternative to forcing the narrow torso to support that massive of a head would be to increase substeps and iterations; at the cost of performance.
Ah excellent - thanks for the explanation!
That’s really good to know about the children needing to be of equal or lesser weight to their parent.
After increasing the radius of the sphere markers, we’re getting a result much closer to what we’re expecting.
Cheers Marcus!