I know I can use footstep tool to create running animation. However, the pose of the running biped is very strange. The arms did not sway much and the biped run like dancing ballet. Many thanks! :)
Edit: By the way, the ragdoll simulation seems not realistic. I hit the ragdoll with a stick. After the hit, the ragdoll is thrown on the ground but it slide on the ground without rolling. It is not same as the reality.

Chris Yiu
3ds max 2011
Vue 8 Xstream
Window 7 64-bit
CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1055T 2.8GHz
RAM: ADATA 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
Display card:Geforce 9600GT 1GB

yeah the running footstep mode does made the biped look like a bit of a pansy. once you’ve tweaked the footstep spacing to get a satisfactory stride, you can just keyframe the arm movement, then copy the frames.

As for the ragdoll, i’ve never used it because t doesn’t seem to run on my machine at all, but it could be a friction setting in reactor.

Out of curiosity what was your chosen method of research when you were trying to find out how bodies react when being hit by a stick?!!

Quad Core Xeon X5355 - 8GB DDR2 - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 - 3Ds Max 2010

Thanks for your input but the friction won’t work. The ragdoll will be thrown away after touching the floor. I need some more help. This problem has been bothering me since I started playing with ragdoll. Any help is much appreciated!

Chris Yiu
3ds max 2011
Vue 8 Xstream
Window 7 64-bit
CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1055T 2.8GHz
RAM: ADATA 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
Display card:Geforce 9600GT 1GB

Are you working to a realistic scale, in both size and weight with reactor?

I set the mass of all of the components of the ragdoll to 10. I change them into Mesh Covex Hull as well.

Chris Yiu
3ds max 2011
Vue 8 Xstream
Window 7 64-bit
CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1055T 2.8GHz
RAM: ADATA 4GB DDR3 1333MHz
Display card:Geforce 9600GT 1GB

Check your units in Customise - Units Setup…
Then check the height of your bibed in those units, is it to scale?
Then check the reactor world scale - 1m= xxxu in MAX.
Then the Gravity, it should be about Z -9.8m or whatever that translates to in your unit setup.
For the weight, the ragdoll script sets all body parts to 10. You can always refine this more by setting weights for individual parts.
Eg. Does a hand weigh as much as a head? Decide on the overall weight of the character, and divide that value between the body parts, taking into account the size and mass of individual parts relative to each other.
The wieght units are Kg.

Always work to scale.

I didn’t used reactor but I know that reactor is more powerful in creating massive simulations but not in body reaction I mean it doesn’t have much of tools to help you in making whole body animation. And about footstep it is just for start and after that you should use freeform Animation with biped to make it realistic. Making good looking animation is based on knowing timing and observing world around. Character Studio has a lot of tools for you to make professional animations. It could mix your animation with Motion Mixer and Motion Flow and it has ability to animate Crowds. So if you want to be a professional in animation you should know Character Studio, because it is easy and powerful. You know it when you use it. There is a lot of books that can help one of them is “3ds Max Animation with Biped
By Michele Bousquet, Michael McCarthy “ I read it and it is very helpful. If you want the book I have it and I’ll be happy to share it.

Mohsen

I didn’t used reactor but I know that reactor is more powerful in creating massive simulations but not in body reaction I mean it doesn’t have much of tools to help you in making whole body animation.

You can use a combination of tools to get the animation you want. Where using CS (or CAT) with footsteps of freeform can create animations of people performing various actions, a reactor/ragdoll setup is a good way to simulate a limp or lifeless body being affected by forces like gravity or colliding with objects. It can be used for fights, falls, crashes, deaths, explosions or any thing like that.
You would generally use the conventional biped animation techniques to drive the character up to the point where you want the reactor simulation to take over and set the reactor Start Frame there. The simulation will use some inertia from any keyframe animation that overlaps with the reactor start frame, so you can manually key in an initial force for the simulation, Eg. in an explosion scene, a character could be walking or running across a battlefield, that would be animated in the usual way, at frame 150, a grenade goes off near by, you would keyframe a rapid movement of the whole body (and maybe the limbs too) away from the centre of the blast over about 5 frames, with keys at frame 155. This will leave the character frozen in mid air from then on, but running reactor from frame 153, the simulation will start with that inertia from the animation you keyed and send him flying off in that direction with limbs flailing until he hits something and falls to the ground.

In this animation, most of it is keyed in the normal way, but I let reactor take over at the crash scenes, the characters are skinned to bipeds with ragdoll constraints, the bikes have wheel constraints and hinge constraints for the forks applied to low-poly proxy meshes that the render mesh is attached to.
http://www.multiprint.uk.com/barebones/video.htm

Samab did you make this its really great.

3ds Max 2010
I7 Sandy Bridge @ 4.5
GPU: FireGL 8700
Soundcard: built in
PSU: 850 Antec