Ragdoll's and Complicated Character Collisions

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys,

I’m wondering how possible it is to switch ragdolls on and off by enabling/disabling the associated rigid bodies? It’s listed on the rigidbody manual reference as a possible option but there’s no example I can find to recusiviely select the correct rigidbodies and set their state to isKinematic.

Essentially the character will need to ragdoll and then stand back up again whilst retaining the same instance states as before the event - so I don’t think replacing out the gameObject to a ragdoll is an option?

Also I’m wondering what the best way is to set up a load of trigger or standard colliders representing and moving with each limb rather then using a simple capsule collider. It would make a lot of sense to use the ragdoll’s coliders for this but again how do you get the SendMessage to hit the parent object?

I suspect that I’m just lacking knowledge in the way Unity works with parent/child relationships but I’m struggling to find a resource to help me get to grips with it.

Thanks for reading and helping out :slight_smile: Muchos appreciation. :wink:

2

I think I would prefer replacing animated object with its ragdoll version back and forth.

You can add ragdoll by:
1- instantiate ragdoll at original object’s position and rotation
2- recursively access the nodes of original object to get the rotation value from and set to its ragdoll counterpart
3- Now you can have two model with same pose, so you can destroy the original one

Switching to animated one is same. But cross fade from ragdoll position to animation might be troublesome…

3

Would this method retain variable states do you think?

Yeah I can see the crossfade being a right pain, I suspect its going to take some procedural stuff to get it going.

4

You wouldn’t have to destroy the original object if you want to revert back to it, just deactivate it so it remains in memory, and it will retain your variables.

5

That sir, sounds like a plan. Thanks guys. :smile:

I’ll keep hunting for some reference material on the hierarchies.

6

If you can find the old Unity 2.x FPS tutorial assets in the resources section, they have the function in there somewhere, its called CopyTransformRecurse().

7

You will lost variable states when you destroy the object, but you can disable - enable the two gameobjects, instead instantiating and destroying.

You can also make an animation, which starts from a regular lie down pose and ends when character stood up. By doing so, you can cross fade from one lying pose to another. It may look natural and will be much simpler than a procedural solution.