# OPERATION RAGDOLL // Swat Soldiers New toy!

Hey gang !

I have couple of ideas to play around with these guys…!
I am planning to implement some MOCAP- FIELDS to create explosions and smash reactions… we will see how it goes!

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Operation ragdoll commence !

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First Round: “Operation RAGDOLL”

• Set up the RAGDOLL
• Play with values

MOCAP vs Ragdoll secondary details. (Animation has NOT been baked into the RIG yet)

At first I could not see the difference It’s subtle, but that last fall onto the ground got a really nice upgrade compared to the motion capture, which is somewhat exaggerated. Especially the legs bouncing up towards the end, and the immediate lack of motion at the end of its animation clip. These deserve some close-ups, with shadows to highlight the contacts.

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Hey Marcus !
Agreed… ! some upgrades from the RG simulation

my idea is to create a more dynamic scene, I want to see if now that I have set up the RG, I can reference this file couple of times and create a shot more interesting where the soldiers interact and react to Fields, columns and stuff like that !

Will keep the WIP posted !

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Testing and learning some Fields…!

It is tricky ! … the visual representation of the fields and the amount of "magnitude that needs to be enter, takes times…
But it is really fun to play with !

Very nice! What was the most tricky aspect you found? Cranking up Magnitude? It’s been difficult finding a good default, since every character has a different size and weight. For very heavy things, you need more magnitude. I’ve considered making it such that the size and weight of objects are ignored, such that the defaults make sense for everything. It would be less realistic, and it would not look natural when there are multiple different sizes of objects within the same field; but perhaps it would be easier to work with?

For feedback, there’s a part where lands at the end that looks like a wooden puppet landing on a marble floor, because the contacts are so hard. I would make both of those environment boxes Dynamic and Pin them in worldspace, such that they are somewhat soft. I’d probably split up the long box into a few smaller boxes, so that the whole thing isn’t moving as one. That would make the landing a bit more soft and possibly more realistic.

Hey Marcus !

here’s my 10 cents “feedback”

1- “Magnitude” Yes… hard to crank it… as an idea… Would be nice to have the Scale attr, as we have on the solver… Where we can X10 X100 the value… so the values are not that crazy on the the GraphEditor

2- Direction vector and visualization vector : When the “Gizmo” (Sphere, box, none etc) it is really hard to guess where the direction is going. Specially with “newton” and Radial was more friendly but still… I guess and icon “Like for example” Direct Lights from Maya has will help. The Size of the icon could also be connected to the Attr that scales x10 - x100 the magnitude.

3- I did try to use “two” (2) Radial forces, but even when one of them were set to ZERO, it seems it was + “adding” force to the vector… So I decided to use just one and animate the position of the Gizmo

Thanks for your feedback… it will help ! I will keep playing around with this…
My idea is to use more that three Soldiers doing different actions from MOCAP Lib (idle - Walking - running) and give the some Big burst to make them blow away !

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… continuing with “Operation RagDoll”…

I start designing the shot, this is the first rough staging/layout that I got to do.
These guys are about to “BOOOMMMM…”

I still have plenty of cleaning, blending and transitioning all the clips, but for now I got the idea planned.

Lots of Rigid body, details, weapon and ragdoll on this shot! let’s see where I can get this shot on my spare time…

Cheers !

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BOOOOOMMM indeed! looking forward to seeing this one evolve.

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Sharing new WIP…

Start integrating the Field explosion.
Choreography of the actions and setting up some rig bodies to make this more chaotic
Still have to set up some better collisions and start adding some Post pose animation to make less stiff and more dinamic motion on the characters.
MOCAP still very rough …

@marcus … one question… Again RG license converts the file to Trial /non-commercial…
Also, Is it possible to submit bigger videos? 8 MB is kind of small to show a longer version.

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Neat! What could look cool is dial down the pose strength after the explosion so they go looser, then dial it back up if some are not fully dead and move around afterwards

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Awesome stuff.

Sorry about that, there is a fix here:

There is not, but there are ways to make videos smaller. Maya does a terrible job compressing video.

Here’s your 6.94 mb file with much better compression, at 0.40 mb, quality is near identical.

For this, I use FFMPEG and there’s also Handbreak which is free and has a nice UI. You’d playblast, and then drop your video in here.

If you’re a techie, you can use ffmpeg and the command-line with this .bat script.

convert.bat

echo off
c:\path\to\ffmpeg.exe -i %1 -q:v 0 %1.mp4

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Awesome I will give it a try…!!
What I did really quick was animating the Stiffness at the moment of the explo…!
Is that what you are saying with “pose strength”?

thanks Jason

Thank you Sir Marcus !

Just start creating more chaos and also baking on layers and keeping what I like…

Baked version!

I am going to start saving on layers what I like and tweaking values to give specific movement to the Swat soldiers So far i like the one on the roof and the ladder… I want to work on the other two

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That guy getting stuck in the ladder is golden.

Oh yeah, that guy’s arms are tearing off. Instant R-rating on this show.

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