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2022.06.09

The highlight for this release is Locomotion!


Locomotion

The above animation is automatically generated, given just a handful of parameters to ragdoll.

  1. A Start and End Position
  2. A Step Sequence
  3. One or more Limits

I'll walk through what each of these mean in the rest of this documentation.


Examples

Let's start with a quick look at what you can get out of this new toy.

Locobot

Modeling by Christophe Desse.

Spot and Friends

Happy Box

Yes, you can give it a terrain. 😊

Two Happy Boxes

Locoboy

A 2-legged quadruped, look at'em go!

Locomotion & Physics

Playing well together.

Humanoid Locomotion

As you can tell, quadrupeds fair much better!

Human Dynamics

But with some physics, it's starting to look nice. :)


Abilities

Here's what we're aiming for with this release.

To achieve this, you've got control over:

  1. The start and end positions of the body and feet
  2. The order and duration of steps, called a Step Sequence
  3. An optional Terrain upon which to walk
  4. A few additional extras for fine-tuning things

There can be any number of feet and it can travel any amount of distance. The Step Sequence is how you're able to achieve different kind of walks.

  • Walking
  • Running
  • Trotting
  • Dancing
  • Jumping
  • ...

And the Terrain is how it can do this across geometry of any complexity.


Limitations

Let's talk about what cannot be solved with Ragdoll Locomotion.

As of this release, it only understands 2 things.

  1. The body
  2. The foot

And for feet, it only understand the position of the foot, not its orientation.

Most importantly, it does not understand arms! Arms are critical to human locomotion, they swing in tandem with each step. This version of Ragdoll does not understand arms. Yet. Meaning it's good for locomotion involving any creature that does not have arms.

But Marcus, that doesn't leave much room for many creatures. They all have arms!

Think again!

  • Dogs
  • Cats
  • ..any quadruped!
  • 6-legged creatures, e.g. crabs
  • 8-legged creatures, e.g. spiders
  • n-legged tentacle monsters

With that out the way, let's look at what it can do!


Workflow

Here's what you do.

  1. Select body
  2. Select feet
  3. Run Assign Plan

Plan?

The generated locomotion is the result of a "plan", meaning each of the inputs you give it. Including this initial selection.


Press T

Locomotion also has a manipulator, accessible by selecting the rPlan node and pressing T on your keyboard.


Background Processing

Locomotion is computed in the background.

Normally, it'll take a second or two to compute 4-12 seconds worth of locomotion, and you can safely interact with Maya whilst it's running. It has zero impact on your overall Maya or character rig performance.


Rig Compatibility

Anything from a box with a sphere for feet to the most complex digi-double will do.

The rig in the above example is nothing special, as you've seen from the examples above this works on "rigs" as complex as a box and 2 spheres.


Multiple Characters

You can have as many characters in the scene as you like.

Parallelism

These currently run 1 at a time, but the next release will unlock this to 1-per-core. Meaning you can have 128 characters computed in parallel on a 64-core AMD CPU. Now for what purpose could you ever need that many? 🤔


Physics

Locomotion is an entirely separate "brain" that you may, or may not, want to combine with regular Markers.

Body and/or feet can be Kinematic or driven by a Pin Constraint, or anything inbetween.


Recording

Unlike a simulation, Locomotion is entirely time independent. So it isn't strictly necessary to record; it will run directly on your character rig.

You can edit the locomotion as keyframes via Maya's native Bake Results command.


Step Sequencer

This will become your new best friend. With an easily recognisable pattern for when to move your feet.

  1. Select Sequencer Mode
  2. Hold Shift to paint
  3. Hold Ctrl to erase

It can be used to produce a wide variety of locomotion, such as this frog sequence.


Targets

Once you've figured how to get somewhere, next up is figuring out where to go.

  1. Select Target Mode
  2. Select either Start or End of the body or foot
  3. Use the Translate gizmo to control the position of either body or foot
  4. Use the Rotate gizmo to control the start and end orientation of the body

Use the Rotate gizmo to control the orientation of the body at the start or end positions.


Limits

Is your character jumping or limping? Maybe dancing? Limits control the area in which each foot is allowed to move.

  1. Select Limit Mode
  2. Select the body to adjust the size of your character
  3. Select a foot to adjust the amount of motion a foot is allowed to have

Here's an example of how a short limit on one foot, and long steps with the other foot, can generate a wounded or limping locomotion.


Terrain

Things can easily get more interesting by swapping out that flat ground with some geometry.


Known Issues

Sometimes, Locomotion can get stuck Thinking.... Let us know if this happens, along how you got to that point. We're working on narrowing this down.


Quality of Life

In addition to locomotion, a few minor things were improved in this release.


Manipulator & Constraints

With the previous release keeping track of the order in which you select things using the manipulator, this release carries on the trend by enabling constraints to be made from within the comfort of the Manipulator. 🤗


Manipulator & Namespaces

If you had 2 controls of the same name but in different namespaces, the Manipulator could get confused about which one you were actually editing.

This has now been fixed.


New Defaults

In response to feedback on the default values, 3 of them has seen an upgrade.

  • Air Density = 1.0 -> 0.1
  • Substeps = 4 -> 8
  • Iterations = 4 -> 8

These can all be found on the rSolver node. And will result in more accurate simulation and less explosions. Bearing in mind that many simulations do not require this amount of substeps and iterations, and they come at the expense of performance. So if you find yourself in need of more juice, lower these back down to 4 or lower. If it looks right, it is right.


Retina Screens

As it happens, MacOS users were getting a much too small Manipulator HUD!

image

This has now been addressed.

image

If you encounter any issues like this, please let us know in the forums!