Keep animation loop after PhysX actor goes dynamic

[ellukazorosa]

Hi!
I've been trying to make a simple scene with a simple rigged character. The idea is to make them fall and pile up. I was following the setup of the sample with the crowd and arrows, but I couldn't get the characters to collide with the floor. (But I guess that's a problem for another day) Then I tried following the example of the worms, now the characters do collide with the floor, but they won't animate no more. 

The actors appear in the pose of the first frame of animation, and they go into ragdoll mode right away. I would like them to keep on moving even when they have collide with the floor, and that they all push each other as they move arms and legs.

Any suggestions on how to achieve that?

Next thing I'm goin to try is to make the character out of max bones, since I am using Cat bones for this test and the worm example is with max bones. But not sure that would fix anything, it's just a wild guess.

Thank you for your time!

[ellukazorosa]

little update!

I found one of the steps that I was missing. Under the actor animation, there is a setting "PhysX rigidbodies" which is set to 0. I start with 1, and started to notice some movement. But not much, now that it is at about "7" the little guys jitter all over the place. Here is a video:



I have been trying with the damping setting in the PhysX shape element, it helps a bit but not entirely.
Any suggestions please?

[tyFlow]

I can't see your settings due to youtube compression, but generally if you want actors to follow animation when in ragdoll mode, you want the strength of the bindings between their bones to be very weak, so the bind strength doesn't counteract the animation matching.

Eventually I will be adding another match animation mode which should avoid these issues, but adjusting binding pose rather than simply applying spin forces to match target animation, but I haven't implemented that yet.

[ellukazorosa]

Hey! thanks for your reply and for your awesome plugin!

After some more testing, yes, making weaker binds helped quite a bit, but the jitter was still there. So I raised the Time Step in the main settings of the TyFlow to "1/4 Frame". And now it's a much much smoother animation:



Another thing that I found is that these guys are very small (I can't believe I missed that...) They are about 1-2 cm in size. I imagine this is affecting a lot the calculations of intersections and such things.

So next step will be to make them the size of a football and play with ore interesting rigs (with blinking eyes for example).

[tyFlow]

The size of them shouldn't matter that much. There are only a couple PhysX settings that are scene-scale dependent (PhysX Shape -> penetration offset/contact sensitivity). But with a lot of bindings you want to really increase the 'pos iterations' setting of the PhysX rollout. Set it to like 24 or 32. It is a key to the bind solver's stability.

[falconking]

Hi!
I've been trying to make a simple scene with a simple rigged character. The idea is to make them fall and pile up. I was following the setup of the sample with the crowd and arrows, but I couldn't get the characters to collide with the floor. (But I guess that's a problem for another day) Then I tried following the example of the worms, now the characters do collide with the floor, but they won't animate no more. 

The actors appear in the pose of the first frame of animation, and they go into ragdoll mode right away. I would like them to keep on moving even when they have collide with the floor, and that they all push each other as they move arms and legs.

Any suggestions on how to achieve that?

Next thing I'm goin to try is to make the character out of max bones, since I am using Cat bones for this test and the worm example is with max bones. But not sure that would fix anything, it's just a wild guess.

Thank you for your time!

Hello. I have the oposite problem. My actors are animated but they go trough the ground. How did you manage to  make them collide with the ground ?

[ellukazorosa]

Make sure Ground collider is active on the PhysX options on that Tyflow. And its height is in the correct place.