Time to do something tricky!
What could be harder then zero-g spaceman fighting tentacle aliens with a wrench ?
I’ll be doing the same full build like I did for the pirate (Pirate Yaarrr! - #23 by Jason - Showcase - Ragdoll Forums)
Stay tuned.
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Oh maaaannnn!!! that will look pretty awesome !!!
Looking forward to follow the process and learn "one or two tips from you " …
Testing out my proxy mesh for proportions.
Always good to test this stuff before you got too far in the modeling stage.
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Oh maaan!!!
Good stuff!!!
Did you just set basic poses for arms and legs?
this is gonna be epic !
Ok that alien is way tooo big! I got carried away with getting the geo looking right, I didn’t think to add the Spaceman as a Reff… good thing I can scale ragdoll puppets 
Here are the cutup meshes for the tentacles, I modelled them to have a
rounding on the ends to when they rotate they won’t leave a gap.Tomorrow I’m going to upload a tentacle test. Using soft joints you can get great squash and stretch feel to your sim.
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Quick Scaled down test.
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The larger one is the best. 
How are they moving about so much? It’s as if they’re under water. Maybe the tentacle monsters could have a “grappling hook”, something to shoot out and latch onto the spaceman and reel him in. I think a space environment is extra sensitive to any pins or worldspace forces. The spaceman could have thrusters to move around perhaps.
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This is looking really nice !!!
I tried something crazy and it worked, I’m going to break this down further in a video.
This is going to need a full Jason talking over a video type of breakdown.
Using Translate Motion: soft you can animate a distance constraints position locally to a marker the video below I have a cube parented to a cube. The small cube is soft
`Translate Motion :Soft’ is amazing, you can animate not only the rotation, but translation of an object and the simulation updates accordingly.
I keep the Translate Stiffness rather high as to not get the tentacle pulling the cube off the big cube.
The big cube is in world space to keep it in a some what locked position.
The Distance Constraint is set to :
Distance Method : Maximum
With min and max to zero , this keep the distance between the tentacle and the cube zero
SO! for the first clip I took advantage of these cubes moving around the spaceman’s arms and head so I know the little guy will always be hitting his beats on those locations… and for the Big Guy I have cubes that control the end of the tentacles , these are parented under the body so they will move where the creature goes… this is getting a bit too complicated to do over txt, it’s recording time!
More to come!
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We are going to be able to do some stellar lighting on this shot. 
For the Big Cube vs Little Cube, I think it could be made more clear if you also animated the Big Cube, or got rid of the Pin for it such that it could fall to the ground. The key difference between this and a normal Pin constraint is that the tentacle would reach the same relative position on the box, no matter where the box were in the simulation. Whereas a Pin would try and reach your animated position, which would remain unaffected by the simulation.
Hey this is pretty nice !!! Pure GOLD !!!
nice tricks…!!! I Will definitely try out more stuff with Distance …
I did play around a bit with Woody test but this is even more creative !
Thanks for sharing
This video is easier to see what’s going on…
The ‘Red’ cubes are
soft transforms parented under the root of the character so they will always move locally where my creature is.
I’ve made distance constraints from those red cubes to the tips of the tentacles so they get pulled along where the red cubes are doing… and where is that… to the mouth
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Some rough storyboard ideas…
We start with a floating wrench, hand grabs it. right into a smash into the face of one alien , teeth go flying, wind up for another hit! but gets grabbed with teeth chomping down on his smashing hand.
He uses toothless to smash the one holding his arm. which stuns it, giving the space man enough time to grab a tentacle , pull and rip it off… we pull to a wide and see a HUGE alien opening its mouth and in a flash Spaceman is lunch! then we have a shot of the alien just eating with his mouth open… maybe we get bits of spaceman flying out the mouth?
Thoughts?
Ideas?
How can we make this even more complex ? I’m also going to have extra aliens holding onto the spaceman the whole time…
I would NOT want to animate this sequence without ragdoll …
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Great! I sense a few slow-motion shots. 
Moving onto an animatic now to get a sense of flow and timing. It’s going to be loose but with Ragdoll we’re going to get some nice looking details right from the start… Here’s a quick test for the last shot where the spaceman gets eaten !
Fun Tip - you can
breaklibs off by having yourTranslate Motionset tosoftwith a highStiffnessand lowDamping
Animate both thePose Stiffness andTranslate Stiffnessto0so there wont be anything controlling themarker`
Here I’m using two Pins to pull the alien apart … I animate the values on the area in which I want the break to happen make sure you set the Translate Motion to soft
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… nice tips !!..
I can only imagine how long would it take me to animate that motion without RG…
…
nice stuff , thanks for sharing !
Eeeeeek 
For future readers, this worked because of the solver is freaking out. This should will likely (hopefully) have been addressed by the time you read this. There will be a Breakable = On attribute, with a Break Force = 10 attribute to determine at what point to break apart.
Love the big beast. Picturing the lighting for this waters my mouth. 
Also it reminds me of an episode of Rick and Morty (S02 E11)
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Blocking out some of the ideas, Might speed the actions up to get it all in for around 20 seconds…
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Goshhhh!!! How many versions can you do in a day???
This is looking really cool!!! the floaty feeling works pretty good
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I’m blown away by this work, and these results. I need to animate tentacles coming out of a fridge and scooping something up. I feel I should learn this kit, in order to do it. Looks like it will fit the purpose so well.
Looking forward to see how you get on…
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