Cineversity

Is there a way to move a character that is rigged using Dynamic Connectors? The attached R21 file is of a ragdoll with all the limbs joined with Dynamic Connectors. When the animation is run, the character falls to the ground as expected. What I’ve been trying to do restrain all the limbs to the pelvis, then animate the pelvis with all the limbs following it (like if you grab someone by the waste, lifted them up and moved them around with all their limbs flopping around). If I move the pelvis outside of the Dynamic Tag tree, all the limbs stay attached to the pelvis and fall limp, but if the pelvis is moved, the limbs don’t follow.

Bruce Kingsley

Hi Bruce Kingsley,

Thanks so much for the file.

Please do the following: apply just a single Collider Tag to the Pelvis. Leave everything else as it is. Press play. Is that what you need?

Enjoy.

Hi Dr. Sassi V,

You came through again! I have to admit, I struggle with the logic of why this works having a collider tag within a dynamic tag, it seems they would be fighting each other. I tried disabling the collider tag later in the animation thinking the whole body would fall to the ground, but instead the head stayed in place and the rest of the body fell. If I delete the tag the whole body falls. I thought the enable/disable would do the same thing. I guess the solution would be to make a hidden object that has a fixed connector and the collider tag, and disable it when I want the body to fall.

Thanks, Bruce Kingsley

Thanks a lot, Bruce Kingsley, for the feedback.

The way I see it:
The collider could be replaced with the Ghost-Tag. So far, my exploration.

When you disable the Tag on the Pelvis, then a disabled tag is there and is not overwritten by the Parent Dynamic Tag. So, the puppet falls apart, as the connectors need the Tag to work.

If you delete the Tag on the Pelvis, then the Parent tag is back to rule them all.

I can’t reproduce the head-only case, though.

All the best

Hi Dr. Sassi, I think is topic is closed and I’m very happy with the results! Sorry for the “head” confusion, I was so pleased with the solution I played with swinging the character around by its head, hands, and feet (looks real cool) and mistakenly referenced the head even so the question was about the pelvis. I’ve already tried baking the object simulation into keyframes that will make it real simple to re-target the animation into a real character because I have all the ragdoll object control points in the same orientation and the connectors limits keep limbs from intersecting!

Everytime I work on a project like this, demonstrates (as you said in a previous posting on the cloth issue), you’ll never know the limits of what you can do with Cinema 4D, or is fairly recognized by other 3D application users!

Thanks again, until next time…
Bruce

Thank you very much for your update, Bruce.

Enjoy your project!