Rag Doll progress

Published September 23, 2015
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This is without doubt the most fiddly bloody thing I've ever tried to do, but we are making some slow progress. Generating a rag doll from the mesh skeleton.

I do not understand the transforms I have to pass to Bullet when creating the constraints. They make absolutely no sense to me, so I'm reduced to just fiddling around, trying random values until I get what I want.

I'm drawing the feet just to ensure that the leg bones are facing the right way, since shapes tend to spin wildly if you get any of these values wrong, Its a nightmare. I need to start looking around for some more information on what is actually going on here, because guesswork is making this very problematic.

I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to generate a skeletal pose from this thing either once the arms are working too. Its all feeling like an impossible task at the moment that I regret ever starting, because this project is now going nowhere unless I succeed at this.

My current situation. Hell. smile.png
5 likes 6 comments

Comments

desdemian

Hahaha. =D Good luck.

Could you elaborate why are you worried? What problems could the arms bring?... as usually if you have one limb working, or two in this case... extending to N shouldn't be too much trouble.

September 24, 2015 12:08 AM
Aardvajk
Hi desdemian, thanks for the comment.

You're probably right, arms should not be a problem. I was just a bit strung out after several hours of fiddling about last night.

I need to research what the transforms passed to the constraint constructors mean in more detail.
September 24, 2015 06:54 AM
Eck
Sometimes the only way I can learn how something works is to hack away at it until it starts behaving properly. It's a perfectly legit way of doing things! smile.png But then, I try to understand why it works. Once I do understand, I'll usually take another pass at the code to clean things up and eliminate any bad fiddly bits along the way.

I think it's looking good though.
September 25, 2015 05:33 PM
Aardvajk
Cheers Eck, true words spoken.

I've actually got a much better handle on the transforms to the constraints since I wrote the above, took a breath and a step backwards. The trick is to just use one global transform, then convert it into the local space of each body. Makes far more sense that way. Will post about this in the next instalment.
September 26, 2015 07:32 AM
evanofsky

Yes, please write more! I'll be doing this fairly soon as well, so I'm trying to figure out the least painful way. Ragdolls are never fun, except when you're playing with them.

September 29, 2015 03:57 AM
Aardvajk

Yes, please write more! I'll be doing this fairly soon as well, so I'm trying to figure out the least painful way. Ragdolls are never fun, except when you're playing with them.


Thanks. My latest entry has an update taking me all the way to mapping the rag doll back to the animation mesh if you're interested.
October 05, 2015 06:37 AM
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