This issue shall report methods to animate a prop_ragdoll's physics objects similarly to other animation software.
Notes
The initial implementation contains modifiers for animating only a group of physics objects: these are known as grouped bone timelines. Such modifiers animate only the lower body, upper body, root, or children of the root.
A big issue I noticed with animating ragdolls for walk cycles, blocking root motions, and pose-to-pose animation workflows is that each physics object moves independently of its parent. That means that if I animate the root physics object only, then all child objects stay in the same place. This issue can be seen when a ragdoll has the m_ballowStretch flag.
This makes animating ragdolls tedious. If a user does not need stretch in their animation, they may use an "Unstretch Tool" (see Ragdoll unstretch tool or sh_smh_unstretch.lua on this repo) to return the physics object to their original positions. Otherwise, an unstretch tool would not be helpful in maintaining physics object offsets
Inspirations
We could look into mimicking prop_dynamic. Moving a parent bone a child bone--by induction, that means a root bone will move all bones under its hierarchy. This is similar to what armatures or skeletons do in other 3D animation software.
Animators should be able to pose ragdolls and animate them like any entity in different animation softwares.
This issue shall report methods to animate a
prop_ragdoll's physics objects similarly to other animation software.Notes
The initial implementation contains modifiers for animating only a group of physics objects: these are known as grouped bone timelines. Such modifiers animate only the lower body, upper body, root, or children of the root.
A big issue I noticed with animating ragdolls for walk cycles, blocking root motions, and pose-to-pose animation workflows is that each physics object moves independently of its parent. That means that if I animate the root physics object only, then all child objects stay in the same place. This issue can be seen when a ragdoll has the
m_ballowStretchflag.This makes animating ragdolls tedious. If a user does not need stretch in their animation, they may use an "Unstretch Tool" (see Ragdoll unstretch tool or
sh_smh_unstretch.luaon this repo) to return the physics object to their original positions. Otherwise, an unstretch tool would not be helpful in maintaining physics object offsetsInspirations
We could look into mimicking
prop_dynamic. Moving a parent bone a child bone--by induction, that means a root bone will move all bones under its hierarchy. This is similar to what armatures or skeletons do in other 3D animation software.Animators should be able to pose ragdolls and animate them like any entity in different animation softwares.