I've been trying to get ragdoll physics to work with custom models, and I've hit a stumbling block.
When the character dies, it continues with whatever animation it was doing when it died, and there is no ragdoll effect at all. I have zeroed the joints (I tried both Bond1 and Stab in the dark Softwares' tutorials), but I don't think that this is the issue - if the joints weren't zeroed, then the ragdoll effect would still happen, it would just look weird. It seems as if the ragdoll system is just not being called at all.
To remove as many variables as I could, I used the fpe and script from the fantasy ogre, with no success. Since is the only variable left is the model itself, there must be some setting I've got wrong. If anyone has any advice, I'd appreciate it.

I wish i could help you.
I have the same problems.. never get it to work correctly. also tried all the tutorials i could find, but no luck...

Harry

Hopefuly Stab coming with some clue.

Has you seem Lee vid about char animation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B6lefpnVN8

I've never deal with custom char, so I've no idea about.

3com

@HarryWever - it's frustrating, isn't it? I can't imagine why the model itself would stop the ragdoll system from being implemented, but it seems that's the case. It's bound to be something simple, or maybe I'm just being optimistic.
@3com - I have a very basic understanding of the ragdoll system, but I'm pretty sure that it works independently of the model's animations, so once a character is dead the animation system is replaced by the ragdoll system. But I could be wrong.

I never tried fantasy ogre, but I've noticed in fantasy ogre fpe+Ogre animation list files, there are not animations values for death/ragdoll statement, so I thinks maybe ragdoll process being hardcode.

3com

I've sort of identified the problem. I changed the prefixes on all the bones from Bip001 to Bip002, and the model now ragdolls when dead. The mesh goes completely haywire when this happens, despite zeroing the joints, but at least the ragdoll effect is happening. I'm not sure what's so special about Bip002, but it seems to work.

For ragdoll to work on a character the bones have to follow the Bip naming convention that GameGuru uses, and needs to have a ROOT bone, the bones then need to be zeroed, and of course ragdoll has to be enabled in the FPE.

@Belidos - I deleted the root bone (a dummy helper at 0,0,0) from the ogre model, and the ragdoll worked fine, so I don't think it's needed. The naming convention is confusing, though. The masked soldier bones have a bip01 prefix, and ragdoll works. The ogre has a bip002 prefix, and ragdoll works, but if I change the prefix to bip1 it doesn't work. My model didn't work with bip001, but did work with bip002, so I guess it's just trial and error.

YUp, all Bip numbers should be either Bip0x or Bip00x, that's the standard for GG, not sure why one worked for you and the other didn't, GameGuru is a little finicky with characters. As to the ROOT, i'll rephrase what I said, you need a ROOT bone and zeroed joints for ragdoll to work properly, without these the character just flops about, with them they die more naturally. With GameGuru characters if I remember right the ROOT bone is called Bip00 or Bip01, or some variation of that, I can't remember which.

Finally got it to work correctly! I had made a few tiny errors with the names (a few spaces that weren't supposed to be there, which are very hard to see unless you look closely), but once I got the names to match the ogre skeleton exactly, and zeroed the joints in Fragmotion, it worked perfectly.
Thanks for the help.

Does anyone have access to the full list of bones (and the correct naming convention) that work with ragdoll physics? Most of the bones I use work, but I'm finding that neck bones beyond the first one don't work, and I don't know if that's because they're not recognized or because they are named incorrectly. I've looked at some of the stock characters, but they all seem to have single neck bone (including the Reptilian character, which has a pretty long neck).

Here's the correct gg bone structure

@Belidos - is that the list of all the bones supported by the ragdoll system, or a list of bones from a model that works with ragdoll?

the list of bones given to us by Ravey on one of the twitch broadcasts.

OK thanks. Disappointingly small list, but at least I know now.