Ragdoll or death anim?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I am making a third-person action game, and I wonder whether I should use ragdoll when my character die. I think ragdoll is good enough to represent a player’s death and simple to use, but I want to know in a big open-world game if they use ragdoll as well. I appreciate any advice in advance :slight_smile:

Thanks,

wcl1993

2

depends, i would say animations are actually better (if you implement them right) the problem is: it’s really hard to make something realistic with animations, let’s suppose you have only 1 death animation (the player just falls forward), it would be weird to see the player just falling forward after something pushed him in other direction, or just falling forward after a granade explosion in his feet, so to get a “perfect” animation, you need to blend animations and manage to use the direction the player is being hit as parameter, and also the place where the player is being hit (to react different after a hit in the leg or in the head), die jumping in explosions etc.

ragdolls would kinda solve the “interation with physics” problem, but they just act weird sometimes, they don’t represent correctly the limitations of the human body/skeleton.

there’s not a “right/wrong” option, you have to take a look at both of them and see what looks better for your case.

3

thanks veccher! So I could use these two methods together to represent a character’s death. Maybe I can use ragdoll to represent the gunshot and make anims specifically for other scenarios (for example, being beheaded by a sword, like how they make in Skyrim).

Speaking of the weirdness of the ragdoll you mentioned, I sometimes see in some projects that the character is still shaking after the ragdoll finishes. I checked the physics assets but I didn’t found anything unusual. Can you possibly see what goes wrong here?

Much thanks,
wcl1993

4

Sure you can use both, about the “shaking” problem, i’m not sure but maybe the character is coliding with something or maybe coliding with itself (hand coliding with an arm for example)

5

So I think I need to disable the collision of the physics assets of the character after it finishes ragdoll. Are there any functions that does this?

Thanks,

wcl1993

6

try “set response to channel” in your collision componnent.