HOWTO rag-doll

From ODE Wiki

OpenDE can be used to simulate the limbs of an anamorphic biped. It is often referred to as a rag-doll.

The rag-doll topic has come up a few times on the mailing list. Some insights that can be gained from these postings are:

• Use capsules for your limbs, instead of boxes. They are less likely to cause awkward collisions.
• Auto-disabling should probably be done as a group (island) not per individual limb.
• Rotational inertia may help stability

Pointers on the list are:

• Ari Shapiro's Dance
• Full rag-doll tutorial from Monstrous Software
• Tyler Streeter's Medieval Playground

From these, I find that Streeter's code sports a nice self-contained class, ODEHuman.cpp, that performs pretty well. It would be an asset to ODE if we can turn this into a standard ODE example. Its main drawback: the shoulder has only one degree of freedom, which is unnatural.

ODE with Irrlicht example of rag-doll video on YouTube by sgt_pinky

UPDATE: Since doing my survey, I've adapted Tyler's code. For a good example on how to do ragdolls in OpenDE, take a look at my crashtest code. (Bram)