And the cubes here?
I selected an FK chain of controls, and instead of capsules, ragdoll creates these cubes I cannot modify in terms radius or lenght. Why is that?
When I assign, the settings are at their default.
Those do look like cubes, but they are actually your NURBS control turned into a shape with volume. For flat NURBS controls, Ragdoll would try and wrap the control with a box, since it can’t figure out a volume for them. Volumes are important, because Ragdoll tries to simulate the real world, and in the real world there are no objects with zero volume.
In this case, you can either:
- Tweak the NURBS CVs to give them volume
- Or set
Shape Type = Capsuleand tweak to fit
You can also choose Shape Type = Box in which case you will be able to tweak the box size.
Btw, the way to tell they are Shape Type = Mesh rather than Shape Type = Box is by looking at the surface of each polygon; they will be triangles as opposed to quads.
Ps, I’ve taken the liberty of tweaking the title of your posts, such that they are more easily searchable by anyone else running into a similar issue. Think of this forum as a repository of answers/questions that will grow and last for a number of years and benefit future users.
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Unfortunately if I go the the channel box and try set a different shape, that doesn’t happen. It will remain a flat box.
Those flat boxes won’t change their volume also, in radius or length. That’s why I am so confused.
A picture here would really help. One thing to keep an eye on is that changes to the shape kick in at the start frame only. So ensure you rewind all the way to whichever frame your Maya timeline is starting at in order to see the change.
From there, you should expect a Box shape to not show any triangles. That’s a sure-fire way of knowing the change kicked in and that it is editable as a box.
Another thing I noticed is that you may have picked Assign instead of Assign and Connect when you assigned to your controls. What the Connect part is important if you want your controllers to stay connected like in your rig, otherwise I expect they would independently fall to the ground.
Can you share which version of Ragdoll you are on? It’ll say towards the bottom of the Ragdoll menu, and you should ideally be on 2022.07.20.
Here are some examples.
In this first one, notice that my controls do turn into box-like shapes, even though they are Shape Type = Mesh. And also notice that they do self-collide, which is why it odds that the shapes in your previous thread did not already collide. Then notice how the triangles disappear, and how I’m able to edit the shape of the box now, via the Extents attributes.
In this next one, notice how I instead use Assign and Connect. By letting Ragdoll know that you want your controls to be connected, it won’t look at the NURBS CVs anymore, but instead look at the hierarchy of your controls and default to giving you Shape Type = Capsule, with the root of the newly created chain being animated - a.k.a. Kinematic.
This is what I expected you should see, when you assign to your controls.
Finally, if you do want Shape Type = Mesh and aren’t happy with the boxes or shape sizes, this is where you can edit the CVs. In the case of assigning to a polygonal shape, rather than a NURBS control, you can edit the vertices of the polygons.
Finally, as it happens, a thread was just made showing the setup of a new character by @boricuapab that may help here:
Also if you haven’t spotted it, there’s an introductory video here.
Hope it helps, and please keep sharing anything else you stumble upon!