Hey everyone, just wanted to show a little video of ragdoll system for my project. I've been working on it for 4 days for now and currently it supports

• Unlimited ragdolls spawned and removed dynamically
  
• Unlimited number of joints and bones per ragdoll
  
• Only hinge joints, working on custom joint
  

Here's a video recorded with Fraps, it has strong lags, but shows the idea. Currently it's rather unstable, if a strong force is applied to a body, it starts to behave weird.
Your comments are welcome

can you put it on youtube or something? i'm trying to have a look now but my laptop's a cripple and rapidshare (or whatever it's called) is annoying.

my laptop's spent the last 5 mins trying to open it, and it's not responding.
rapidshare won't let me try again for a while so i'm a little cranky (i opted to "open" and not "save").

i'm really keen to have a look tho. you're lucky i'm so curious

julz

here it is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpy-o_Zf28I

haha! you're a two-fold champion:

1) for ragdolls (i know Helghast has his, but good onya for doing your own and taking a different approach). i'm keen to give newton physics a go when i finish school, so i've been keeping an eye out for good examples!

2) for actually getting one up at youtube so quick for me, at least, it's so much easier to watch.

my first thoughts were of the game "skate", on ps3. have you checked it out? very good game. probably your kinda thing. uses the analogue controls to do tricks -- much better than button-mashing combos in "tony hawk's".

apart from a few jolts, it looks good! the arms are pretty rigid, which i guess is due to the hinge-work, but i reckon if you add intermediate shoulder bones you might be able to get more flexible arm joints?

i'd like to see this integrated into a skate game

good onya,

julz

Yeah, i want to play EA Skate too, to check out non-THPS approach to skateboarding game.
As for ragdoll, i think i should disable self collisions between bones, change primitive type from poly to capsule and implement joint angle limits. I think that'll boost the performance and realism

about "skate": i've got the demo, and it is insanely cool. if you have a ps3 download it. the replay editor is so good it's not funny, even if you aren't gonna save and look at the replays ever again. it's not quite the topic so i won't go into brutal detail, just take my word for it that it's great

back on-topic: could you perhaps use "motors" (i don't know what they're called in Newton, but that's what they are in 3DGS physics) to make the limbs move with some intelligence? i guess you wouldn't try it until the actual ragdoll is ironed out more, but it could be used to get the skater to attempt to protect his face with his forearms when he stacks it, and whatever other protective measures a real person might take in the brief time between falling off the board and coming to a complete stop.

julz

yes, that's the most obvious disadvantage of using ragdoll for bails - looks like the skater is dead i'll try to achieve something like that, but i'm not sure i'll succeed. Thanks for comments so far

Nice video Shadow, looking forward for more
About the ragdolls interaction, when a model collides with a certain 3D object in your video it looks abit static, the limbs need to react at more realistic way. I know ragdolls are hard when it comes to plausibility but you're on
the right track

Cheers

Frazzle

Yes, character should be more plastic and dynamical. Another ToDo
Thanks frazzle