I’m trying to make an optionally-physical animation go into ragdoll.
Everything is peachy when character is 100% animation controlled, but if physics enabled he noticeably twitches when going into ragdoll. It also looks fine if I slowly raise physics blend to 1.0, so I guess when character is getting ragdolled it doesn’t start from actual condition skeletal mesh currently in, but rather from what it would have been if blend was 1.0 or 0.0 or something else… not sure what’s going on exactly or how to solve it.
Can someone help me out with it please?
Was struggling with this problem for a while. Watched a lot of tutorials and forum threads. No one ever talks about it, so either it’s something so basic it isn’t even worth mentioning, ragdolling from physical animation is not used often or not a lot of people are using 5.2 and in older versions it all works flawlessly out of the box.
Tried to make pose snapshot at last moment before ragdoll and fall from that, didn’t help.
Another solution was to rapidly interpolate blend from current to 0 and then go full ragdoll, but that looks bad - for example, character was running, now I want to ragdoll it. Fast interpolation will make him fold first, butt to ground, nose to feet and then fall freely which disrupts the movement and just looks unnatural.
Another thing to try out is collision settings of skeletal mesh and capsule. Seems like using “character mesh” for character mesh is hardest to adjust. Using “pawn” for mesh might help, but I had some problems with it too. Alas, can’t remember what it was, tried too many combinations.
Ended up keeping blend weight at 1 at all times and controlling how much it affects the character with strength and physical profile. For some reason switching strength from 1 to 0 doesn’t twitch and acts as expected.
This approach produced interesting side effect - since character is always physical, it slightly bends when standing on moving platform when it changes direction, limbs get pushed back when moving through tight openings, head tilts under low ceiling etc. Looks alright.
It works for my needs, but might be a bad idea for hordes. Pretty sure it negatively affects game’s performance.