Dynamic Floating Man Tutorial

Remember that assessment that was mentioned in the earlier post? Yeah that UFO one mentioned here. Well this tutorial is also apart of that assessment. The idea is to be able to have the mannequin model float up to the UFO dynamically.

Bullet will be used to achieve this effect so it will need to be loaded before attempting this tutorial. If you don't know how to do this go into Windows>Settings/Preferences>plug-in manager and load Bullet as shown below.

Now that that is taken care of we can start the tutorial.

1. Load up your Mannequin

2. Create joints for the Mannequin model (animation tool set: Skeleton>Joint Tool)

3. Bind the mesh to the joints (animation tool set: Skin>Smooth Bind). At this point you can paint weights on the mesh to have it deform better.

4. Select the joints and from the Bullet menu select 'Create Rag doll from Skeleton and you Will get capsules around the joints.

5. Create a ground plane to test the collision on the capsules. With the plane selected use the 'Create Passive Rigid Body' option.

6. Press play and the capsules should fall and collide with the ground plane. If they explode then your joints starting point is intersecting the ground plane so move it so they don't start of intersecting.

7. Now to make the joints follow we need to Parent Constrain the capsules to the corresponding joints using the below options.

8. When play is pressed now the joints will follow the capsules.

9. To get it float up go into the bulletShape node and change the Gravity option to 9.8 in Y in the basic fields options. Press play and the Mannequin will float up.

 10. Now that your Mannequin is dynamically floating you can select the capsules and go into their bulletRigidBodyShape and tweak the forces/impulses options to make joints react differently to the gravity.

There you have it. A dynamically floating Mannequin.

Stay Frosty