Tentacles

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1

Put this together for an underwater show! The trick is to disable gravity and increase air density.

Here’s the gist of what’s going on.

  1. Dynamic Controls for tentacles
  2. Guide Control for the head
  3. Head constrained to motion path
  4. Wind to break up the motion a bit
  5. Visualiser to see the force
  6. Root tentacle animated, only the root
  7. High air density on the solver
  8. No Rotate Damping on rigids
  9. No gravity
  10. Low limit strength, to give it an elastic look

“Air Density” is just a multiplier for the Translate Damping and Rotate Damping attributes on each rigid. The .airDensity on the scene node is a multipler for all rigid air densities and a convenient way of making bulk changes.

The root tentacles have a set-driven-key to centralise their animation to a single attribute, which is on the guide control itself. The same node driven by the motion path.

For more details, have a look at the scene!

3 Likes
2

@marcus Im interested in studying this setup, but when I opened the file using ragdoll 2022.07.20 the scene looks like this

sceneNotWorkingInRd20220720
sceneNotWorkingInRd202207201585×789 46.6 KB

3

Oh lord, this is one of the eldest examples there are, before early access, before official launch and knowledge of Ragdoll. :sweat_smile:

Today, you can achieve a similar effect by:

  1. Assigning to a squid-like character like this one
  2. Setting Gravity = 0
  3. Setting Air Density = 50 or so
  4. Pulling on the head of the squid with a Pin Constraint

Is there anything in particular you were hoping to learn from the look you are seeing? It’s all pretty basic stuff at this point.

4

Ok, how do we visualize the force field in a 2d plane in the current version of ragdoll 2022.07.20?

5

Forces are all visualised in 3d nowadays, much cooler (and practical) :blush: