Ragdolls are scary

Does anyone else have trouble working with ragdolls? I’m literally scared of testing them. I set one up wrong today (didn’t assign a correct bone to the “middle spine”, I guess), and the whole character flied off, while one bone remained where it was, making the whole thing stretch like crazy. I set up a new ragdoll, but I’m too afraid I might witness that again. Don’t know what to do and how to test it xD

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I wouldn’t have thought something like that could scare someone named “HellSpawnGames” who I’d imagine works on some kind of horror game, judging by your skeleton avatar… :slight_smile:
If it seriously disturbs you, I’d try if deactivating the skinned mesh renderer and watching just the transforms in scene-view works. Trial and error is a good way to learn for many things, I think this likely is one of them. Just do it!

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@Martin_H
No I’m fine with gore/blood cause it’s pretty usual stuff seen in many horror movies/games, but ragdolls stretching is just too weird for me (and the twitchy/freaky way they do it, it jumpscares me), thanks for the renderer tip, I couldn’t think of it xD I guess that’s the only way to avoid seeing the horror.

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LOL! :smile:

So I got the ragdolls set up and ready and I tested them on an empty scene (by turning off mesh renderer, then after activating the ragdoll flashing it on for a split second to check if all’s fine), then proceeded to test them in game. All was fine first, then I saw that freaky fast-moving/spinning mess of polygons moving toward me, I screamed loud af (my throat now hurts and I think I woke all neighbors up, it’s 8 am here) and hardly reached the pause button with my shaking hand. I can’t take it xD

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Maybe you have some very specific phobia that you don’t even know about yet, because it’s so unusual and nothing in your normal life triggers it? If so, it might be interesting to investigate what caused it in the first place (if there is a specific cause at all).

Maybe you could investigate effects for handling dying creatures without ragdolls, like freezing their animation in place and quickly dissolving them with a shader and particles.

No, I’m generally jumpy and things my mind can’t immediately process as normal terrify me.
I’m going to use ragdolls though, cause I need corpses to stay where they were killed (in my game you can reanimate them as zombies). I’ll just have to find a way to cheat the fear xD

You can try something like puppetmaster?

I’m tight on budget. My ragdolls work, at least on empty scene, idk what happened back then, I thought that maybe Animator was overriding bones but I checked, animator’s disabled on dead bodies. I don’t think it’s the ragdoll itself but rather its interaction with something in the world that caused it to break. I’ve made a few changes and possibly fixed it, but I’m still too scared to test thoroughly xD

Ok, I think using a wireframe shader will make it look less disturbing if a ragdoll starts stretching & stuff.

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Finally found the solution. Playing death metal loud in the background and shaking camera helps to dissolve the anticipation of thrill and make the potential moment of the scare feel less abnormal/eerie (death metal “prepares” mind for it). I know the whole thing looks silly but this was a real issue for me.

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Good to hear you’ve found a solution. Interesting that death metal of all things helped. “Song of protection + 10 resistance to jumpscares” ^_^. Kind of makes me think of the most descriptively long songtitle I’ve ever seen:

Nile - Papyrus Containing the Spell to preserve its possessor against attacks from he who is in the water

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwsndxT2wQc

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You are looking at this wrong. It’s not a problem to be solved. It’s an opportunity to be grasped.

Retheme it as a horror game and ship it out!

:stuck_out_tongue:

Most people aren’t likely as sensitive to this as I am xD
So it appears that the issue was in colliders. Alive enemies had their colliders enabled on their limbs, just like the dead ones. And when one alive NPC walked over a corpse, their limbs literally got entangled … (ew xD). That’s my theory, 'cause now after I disabled limb colliders on alive NPCs it hasn’t happened again yet.

nah, it is a very normal reaction. Many people get nausea when they watch contortionists and horror movies play off it too. Like when they turn their head completely 180 or have joints backwards. There was one recently where the little girl zombie turned her knees backwards. There is probably something deep in our evolution that makes seeing stuff like that make us a little ill.

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Do I sense a tailwalking across the pond?