How To Create A Ragdoll Simulation In 3ds Max - 3D VFX Tutorial

hey everyone here from tunnel vision tv and in today's tutorial we're going to look at ragdoll simulations in 3ds max as the one you can see on the screen this little guy being hit by a sphere and yeah some nice simulation going on here so let me just stop this and first of all let's just reset our scene okay and then we're going to start off by importing our model so i'm just going to go import and then i've got this low poly model that i exported from mudbox and it's actually working pretty good we don't have any materials we don't have to worry about that so as you can see it's not a very high resolution model but that will work perfectly and first of all what we need to do is we need to start by adding some bones to this little guy so i'm going to go to my systems tab here on the side and then i'm going to click on bones and then what i'm going to do i'm just going to draw some bones throughout so i'm going to start in his head and just click and click there there again something like that and then down to his knee down to his ankle and then one for the foot and then you can just press escape or right click to stop that and then we're going to click on this bone just to start with another bone on this side and then one down to his knee ankle foot i'm going to right click and then i'm going to click on this bone here to do his shoulder and then down to his elbow and then down to his wrist and then one for the hand and then right click to get out of that and then we're going to click on this bone again to the shoulder and down to the elbow down to the wrist and then one for the end okay and then right click to get out of that so very simple very basic stuff it doesn't have to be too realistic but something like this will work perfectly and i'm just going to go out of this view and go into the side or the left view and then we just need to try and line up these bones to the mesh so i'm going to just zoom in here a bit and then you can use your normal move rotate and scale just to to move these bones into place so as you can see if i go into rotation for this bone i can just do something like that same with that one and you can also scale them if you want to make them a little bit longer so if you do scale it'll actually extend the bone slightly so it doesn't have to be perfect i'm just going to quickly go through this and try and get them into place and then the same for the bones in the arm so i'm just going to try and align them so they kind of go down the side of the arm something like that okay so let's go into perspective mode and then what you can do is select your mesh right click on your mesh go to object properties and then you can click on the see through to make the mesh a little bit see-through so you can actually see the bones and then i'm just going to rotate around to see if our bones are actually inside the mesh okay so once you've got your bone system in place then we're going to start by adding a skin modifier to the mesh so we're going to click on the mesh go to your modify tab and then we're going to add a skin modifier and then with your skin modifier selected you're going to scroll down a little bit until you see bones and then the add button we're going to click on add and this is where we're going to select all our bones so you can actually just click on select all and that will automatically select all the bones in your scene and then we're going to click on select and that's basically just going to assign all those bones to that skin modifier okay so the next step is to add the ragdoll modifier to your bones so what you need to do is you need to select your first bone that you created the root bone which is the one inside the head so another way if it's kind of difficult to to click on these bones what you can do is just click on the mesh right click and just freeze that freeze selection and that will make it a little bit easier to click on these bones so that you can't select the mesh so i'm going to click on this first bone and then with your mass effects toolbar at the top if you don't have it just right click and then make sure this massfx toolbar is ticked and with that first bone selected i'm going to click on this little guy here and then i'm going to set this to create dynamic ragdoll and that's automatically going to go through all the bones and it's going to select them all and you will see this little ragdoll symbol right at the top which means we've got our ragdoll simulation on those bones so i'm going to click on this ragdoll icon and there's just one thing that i want you to change you on the side in the properties if you scroll down all the way you'll see where it says physical shape and it says source bones and then below that it says shape capsule and i usually just change this to convex hull and you'll right at the bottom you can click on update all bones and you'll see it will just change the appearance or the actual physical shape of those bones to be normal bones again and not those funny capsule meshes and i think this will just give you a more realistic simulation okay so let's give it a quick go so i'm going to click on the start simulation button let's see what happens and you can see our guy is kind of morphing and falling around so that's working and so then i'm going to just zoom out here a little bit and i'm going to create a box just a floor basically so let's just zoom out here create a box something like that and then with this floor selected i'm going to click on this button here and go to set selected as static rigid body and then we're going to open the massfx toolbar so we've got access to that here on the side and then i'm going to uncheck use ground collisions because we actually want to use the geometry in our scene as the floor and let's just do a quick simulation again okay there we go so he's actually falling on the floor so let's stop that and let's go back into the mass effects toolbar and then i'm just going to dock it here to the side so we've got access to that and then we're gonna increase the sub steps from three to around ten that will just give us a little bit of a better simulation okay so let's add an object that will actually interact with our little guy so i'm gonna add a sphere just something like that make sure it's in line with our model something like that and um let's just do very simple animation so i'm gonna enable auto key and we're gonna go forward about let's say 25 frames and i'm just going to move this sphere through our guy so let's just able auto key and then we've got this basic animation setup and then with that sphere selected i'm going to change that to a kinematic rigid body right let's simulate that quickly okay there we go um let's just maybe give a little bit of an angle to this sphere so i'm going to enable autokey again and then on frame 25 i'm just going to move it upwards slightly okay so we've got like a a little angle that that ball is moving in so let me just click on simulate again okay there we go okay so that's our basic ragdoll simulation so what you can do is to if you if you're not getting a very um realistic simulation you can try and uh just adjust the position of these bones so it's kind of in the middle of those meshes and another thing that you can do is let's just unfreeze our mesh so i'm going to go unfreeze all and if we click on the mesh and you go into the skin you just expand that skin modify and we click on envelope so this is where you basically get access to these envelopes on the bones and how much they affect the mesh around them so if we just zoom in there a little bit you can take these envelopes and move them around and this will basically give you access to just fine tune the way that these bones affect the the mesh around them so you can kind of just drag this and extend it something like that so let's just simulate this again okay so that's looking pretty cool and yeah once you're happy with your simulation you can just go to your mass effects toolbar and then you can click on bake all and that will basically just bake or save the animation as keyframes so as we scrub through this now you can see that we've got our baked simulation cool so that's the basics of ragdoll simulations using 3ds max i hope you guys enjoyed this one give me a thumbs up if you did and also remember to click on that subscribe button if you want to be notified of new weekly tutorials thanks a lot for watching and i'll see you guys next time cheers bye [Music] flush

Channel: Ruan3D

Views: 34,441

Keywords: Tutorial (Media Genre), Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), 3ds max ragdoll, 3ds max ragdoll tutorial, 3ds max ragdoll tutorials, 3ds max tutorials, vfx, visual effects, vfx tutorials, visual effects tutorials, ragdoll simulation, ragdoll tutorial, massfx, massfx ragdoll, massfx ragdoll tutorial, how to create a ragdoll in 3dsmax, tunnelviziontv, 3ds max beginner tutorials, 3ds max tutorials for beginners, ragdoll tutorials, massfx tutorials

Id: nwt2OgqN2Pk

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2015