Tiger interaction -- Use case

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Here’s an example of how I used ragdoll to help with the interaction with a backplate.

  1. I re-created the rake movement in 3D space using a placeholder. This would allow the ragdoll to interact with it. (It was a simple model rotoscoped to the footage.)

  2. I built a simple ragdoll hierarchy to mimic the tiger’s arm, paw, and fingers.

  3. The rake was set to animation mode, so its movement wouldn’t be affected by the tiger’s paw movement.

  4. I added a few keyframes to get the tiger’s paw to plant on the rake.

I really loved how it was able to mimic the rakes handle hit out of the screen by coliding with the upper arm, it was something I needed in there and it worked!

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Thanks for sharing @taylorkevin, the results looks great! :heart:

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Indeed! One of the things that stands out to me is one of the things we’ve internally solved recently, which is those hard contacts. A real tiger would be soft and squishy, like any organic living thing. And yet interaction with other objects, like this rake, is hard like two bowling balls coming into contact.

There’s not much that can be done about it in today’s version of Ragdoll, the underlying technology is rigid body dynamics. Rigid as in hard. But, soon we’ll have soft contacts. :blush:

It’ll apply to any and all contacts, and works just like stiffness/damping for Pin Constraints and normal Markers, and is meant to handle cases exactly like this.

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Yea I’ve been meaning to ask all about that, like having a radius of how much it would intersect would be useful… or thinking even further down the line, how much squash and stretch we’d get from a marker :grinning:

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You’d have a “radius” yep! The next version will separate between soft and hard meshes, such that you can have one for a “skeleton” inside of your character that cannot be intersected with, along with a soft outer shell, like this ball here.

Squash and stretch is also possible, initially using default Maya deformers where Ragdoll can output the amount of intersection between soft and hard, like a value between 0-1, that you could plug into a squash deformer. Later Ragdoll could perform this internally, and offer an extra output from the Marker that is the deformed version of the input geometry.

Shouldn’t be talking about this yet, but it’s really cool stuff that I’m excited to share soon ™ :blush:

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