Transitioning in and out of ragdoll physics. How is this often done?

I hope this will be a good forum for it, since my questions are more about design than specific technical issues.

I've learned the basics of making ragdolls with rigidbodies, colliders and character joints, and i'm pretty good at making general characters with animators. Now i'm ready to try unifying these systems

Our current plans call for the ability to turn ragdolling on and off at will, so that we can make a character collapse when desired, but also make them get up again and return control to animations. Ie, we won't just be using it on corpses

I have a few ideas about how i might accomplish this:

1. Keep a seperate ragdoll version of the character object, and swap it in for the normal one when desired. This seems like it would have a vast array of problems, such as script states and various changes not transitioning over without a whole lot of extra labour, i don't like this choice.

2. Dynamically add and delete the appropriate components, when entering/leaving ragdoll mode. This would be rather complex since i'd have to save all of the component values, and it seems to me like the process of suddenly instantiating 20-100 physics oriented components(3 per bone) would be pretty performance intensive. But it does seem clean.

3. Toggling the Enabled status on the components, to turn them on and off without having to contantly recdreate them. This sounded like the best idea until i actually took a look, and noticed that there is no enabled checkbox for rigidbodies or character joints. From which i logically deduce that disabling them isn't possible ? I could turn off the colliders, but i feel like having all those other components around constantly would cause some issues, especially since i only need them for a small fraction of the time

Are there any other possibilities ? please say yes. give me advice D:

 

I've done that. It's been over a year (and a major Unity version) since I last fiddled with it, though. Give me a few moments to dig it up.

 

OK, here's my reversible-ragdoll demo:

http://luminaryapps.com/temp/RagdollTest/RagdollTest.html​

Instructions are onscreen. Be sure to try knocking or dragging them both face up and face down, as they use different "get up" animations in each case.

EDIT: My demo is based partly on this blog post from 2013.

@Nanako, I'll PM you with a link to where you can download the project.

 

well now, this is interesting. I'm reading that blog post, it seems to be mostly concerned with animation blending, which is a problem i hadn't even considered. It mentions a few issues with shortcomings of mecanim functionality, do you have any idea if some of those have been updated or improved?

very nice demo, it's impressive ^_^

 

The animation blending is important mainly when transitioning out of ragdoll mode, and back to a mecanim pose. You don't want to just snap back into pose, so you have to blend gradually from whatever pos the ragdoll has landed in, back to the pose determined by the animation system.

And yeah, it does mention some complications at the time which have since been improved... but I'm sorry, I don't recall whether my latest version of the code took advantage of the improvements or not.

 

you are very awesome, thank you for the help ^-^ i'll poke through this thoroughly and see what i can turn up

 

Manually controlling the blend between the animation states and the rag-doll is the standard way this is done. Kudos to @JoeStrout for his awesomely useful reply!

Gigi

 

Hmmm.. I tried this turning off the Animator/Mecanim component and my mesh disappeared. Was busy with a paying gig so I have not returned to it yet and was looking at a 90 dollar solution on the Asset Store. What did I miss that keeps my skinned mesh visible?..or is a Unity version bug??

 

Some mecanim stuff gets fixed in 5.1, which is coming soon (tm).

From what I've heard, we have maybe around 2 weeks before 5.1 launches.