Blender Beta
Thanks to Blender Studio for the Dragonfly rig ❤️
Beta Testing Ragdoll in Blender 🥳
Welcome
Ragdoll is a real-time physics solver for Maya, and now it's coming to Blender. At this moment, we are working hard to port features from the Maya version of Ragdoll into the Blender one. In the meantime, we invite you to join us in shaping its final form for Blender animators!
AddOn Status
| Blender Version | Windows | macOS (Intel) | macOS (Apple Silicon) | Linux |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.4 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| 3.5 | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
A Quick Warm Up
From left to right:
- A simple cycled up-down animation applied to the base of the Dragonfly
- It's then driving the Ragdoll simulation
- Once we are satisfied, Ragdoll records the result and bakes it onto the rig
- Profit!
And that's basically what Ragdoll is for — adding the fun of physics to your animation workflow!
To learn more about this Ragdoll Dragonfly, read below!
Interface
Since we are playing with physics, you can find Ragdoll in the Physics Properties tab,
if the current active object is compatible with Ragdoll.
Marker
What types of things can work with Ragdoll (assign marker to)?
At this moment, only Mesh-type objects and Pose-Bones can. NURBS or Empty may be supported in the future.
Mesh
When the current active object is already in Ragdoll, the Physics Properties tab will display associated properties.
Pose Bone
To work with Pose-Bones, enter Pose Mode and select the bone you want to use with Ragdoll.
You can, and mostly would, select multiple bones and click on the Assign and Connect button.
It will give you a chain of markers.
Solver
Note that the Ragdoll solver (and all its friends) can be found in a collection called RagdollCol.
The solver node is responsible for simulating physical interactions between all its associated markers and more.
Group
Currently, when clicking the Assign and Connect button with multiple objects/pose-bones, a Group is created with them.
A group allows you to batch tweak some common properties like Stiffness and Damping for convenience.
More About Them
Please visit the Learn Ragdoll website for more details about them. Especially this page which discusses the cornerstone of Ragdoll — Marker.
Manipulator Tool
The Ragdoll manipulator tool provides a direct way to tweak some common marker properties. It will become more feature-rich in the future, and you can expect to spend more time using it when working with Ragdoll.
The tool can be activated through here:
And the solver node needs to be selected to bring up the GUI.
Tips to Make Dragonfly Fly
Full walkthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAAiqxYW9Us
Here's a short list of tips that could help:
Connecting Marker
When assigning multiple markers, those markers will be chained together, and the first one will be set to Kinematic. And if a marker's behavior is set to Kinematic, it will 100% follow the input animation.
Since we will only apply an up-down movement to the rig base, just pick the torax (chest) of the Dragonfly for the first marker to follow that animation.
Then, when assigning the next chain of markers, remember to also start from that torax bone.
Offset Solver
Other than changing the Display Type property to Wire in the Solver for a cleaner view, sometimes you may want a side-by-side
view when editing markers. If that's the case, simply move the Solver node and all the marker shapes will step aside.
You may want to uncheck Lock Object Modes for faster object and bone selection.
Once done, move back and then activate the Manipulator tool for matching marker shapes to geometry.
IK Legs
You may also reference this page.
Simply put, we don't want to assign markers directly to IK controllers since physics is more like an FK thing. So instead, we would assign them to the bones that are driven by IK controls.
With this Dragonfly rig, although we can find them, they are basically locked. To work around that, the idea is to add an extra bone (the gray one in the middle) and make our own FK to drive IK.
Scene Scale
This Dragonfly is quite a big one. To get a much real-world result, we have to tune down the scene scale.
That's it!
We hope you have fun, and please don't hesitate to ask questions on the forum!