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Ragdoll 4.0 Beta

Highlight for this release is 1 year of development!


New UI

The UI has seen a complete overhaul to facilitate the new Ragdoll Standalone, wherein Ragdoll can be used by anyone not familiar with Maya or Blender.


Cluster

Simulate tens of thousands of pieces with ease.

It will simulate each individual polygon island of your mesh.


Usage Maya

  1. Select mesh
  2. Ragdoll -> Cluster

Ragdoll will use each polygon island as its own rigid body, perfect for shattered meshes or mesh collections.


Balancer

A new solver has been added that lets characters preserve balance as they try and reach the poses you give it.


Ragdoll for Motion Builder


Soft Contacts

Contacts can now be soft, like in reality. No contact is 100% hard, unless it's diamond-to-diamond, and not even then. But rigid body solvers traditionally treat contacts as if they were, resulting in a wooden puppet-type of look.


Tapered Capsules

More control over shapes, without resorting to polygonal meshes.

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Rendering 2.0

The rendering pipeline has been upgraded with some new bells and whistles!

  • Smooth Shading
  • Shadows
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Motion Blur


Smooth Shading

The smoothest normals since 1979.


Shadows

Pixel-perfect shadows should help make it easier to spot issues with your simulation.


Screen-space Ambient Occlusion

Darkening in the crevices of your geometry make intersections and close contact pop.


Motion Blur


Preferences

There's a new window to control the overall render settings under Ragdoll -> System -> Ragdoll Rendering that look like this.

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Impulse Visualisation

Contacts now include the direction and magnitude of the force being applied, helping you understand how strong (or weak) forces are at specific locations.


Translate and Rotate Drag

Previously called "Translate Damping" and "Rotate Damping", these attribute lets you block motion of an individual Marker, similar to the Air Density attribute on the Solver except applied to an individual Marker.

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Custom Maya DPI Scale

You can override the scale of your UI in Maya's global preferences.

Ragdoll wasn't aware of this, and used your display scaling directly. Now it is aware, and scales with Maya as you would expect!

Programmers

For the programmers out there, the trick is to query maya.MQtUtil.dpiScale, instead of going through native Qt, e.g. QWindow.QScreen().logicalDotsPerInch() / 96.0 since Maya overrides this value.


Quality of Life

Record Translation on Individual Markers

Typically, Markers are assigned to a hierarchy of controls in a character rig, and thus translation is only relevant to the root control. But when assigning to a series of objects part of, say, a brick wall then you would expect all objects to have translation recorded as well.

That is now the case!