Active Ragdolls - Physics Based Animated Characters & Balance System

Active Ragdolls
(Asset Store Link)
(YouTube Video)


*Screenshot captured from actual running game instance.*
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Why choose active ragdolls? Active ragdolls is an easy to use solution that brings more life to humanoids in your game by making them respond to physical forces in the world. It even comes with an ActiveHumanoidBalancer component that allows for complex behaviours such as loss of balance, getting back up, and even stumbling using realistic calculations to determine center of balance and center of mass of your active humanoid. The system is highly configurable.

How does active ragdolls differ from other solutions? Active ragdolls is extremely easy to drop into existing projects as the provided setup wizard generates an animated skeleton that is driven by your prefab's existing animator. Simply run the required setup wizard(s) and your kinematic humanoid will be an active ragdoll. Active ragdolls has a performance impact similar to that of the equivalent non-active ragdoll allowing you to have many active ragdolls in the world without a major drop in performance. The asset even allows you to knock the active humanoid around the world using physics objects changing their position entirely (although this can be disabled through a single setting).

What future improvements do we have planned for Active Ragdolls? The next release (v1.1.0) features major improvements to the active humanoid balance system and hugely improves the documentation. Future updates will introduce dynamic 'follow strength' scaling for limbs making for even more human-like reactions to physics forces (e.g: when the humanoid receives a strong hit to their chest their head will whip back more realistically). After that we will shift our focus to an 'ActiveHumanoidPreservation' system that will allow the active humanoid to initiate procedural generated animations to 'preserve' their safety (i.e: covering their head when falling, or reaching for a spot where they received a hard blow.)

User feedback is the number one driving force for future features and improvements and we rely heavily on you to tell us where you think the asset can be improved, or share ideas for features that will make your game even better.

What was the motivation behind developing Active Ragdolls? While developing our VR game we decided the AI in our game felt plain and non-interactive, we developed Active Ragdolls to make our game feel more immersive while attacking enemies in VR, especially using melee weapons, the asset helped bring the game world to life making a much more immersive and enjoyable experience for players.

Bring your kinematic ragdolls to life with Active Ragolls.

 

Asset is currently 50% off as of December 19th 2022 for the Unity new years sale.

v1.1.0 released!
Added

• Stumble system to ActiveHumanoidBalancer.
• Added smoothing to getup rotations.
• ActiveRagdollInterpolator component, used to interpolate from current state to animated skeleton state. Used in demo scene with get up system. Customizable interpolation curve.
• More coder friendly events and API improvements.
  
• XML documentation for intellisense comments.

Improved

• Getup system.
• Huge improvements to and more complete documentation.