Connecting Kart models to physics engine?

[asciimonster]

I just had an idea:
Since we are animating the karts, we are adding controls to the characters (controls to move arms, legs, etc.). Why not let those controls be controlled by the physics engine?

For instance: when a kart falls, the control that are marked as "Physics Controls" go up, and when the land the move down.
You need to define the amplitude for each "physics control" (Keep it simple: an acceleration of x g = a movement of y cm)

Possible snag: Can this be done without disrupting the IPO animation?

Is this the way to go? Is this easy to accomplish?

[Auria]

Hi,

I believe what you're talking about is referred to as "ragdoll" generally. It is feasible, but there are two issues I see :
1) to get realistic angles of members, one has to add all kinds of constraints to the bone movement to limit how wide angles can the bones can be "folded". This is very non-trivial; a lot of fine-tuning work in blender, and coding work to export them into a file, and more coding work to extract these constraints from the file and feed them to bullet
2) this kind of ragdoll movement would make the characters look dead - this effect is very often used for dead bad guys in more violent games. I'm not sure we want STK to have characters look dead or seriously injured

[hiker]

Possible snag: Can this be done without disrupting the IPO animation?

Which IPO animations are you talking of? Characters are animated with armatures, and your approach would replace this.

I agree with auria - it would be a lot of work, esp. since we would have to do this individually for all characters, and I am not convinced if the visual would be improved enough to justify this. We don't really have one armature shared between all characters, so this means tweaking for quite a few different characters.

Cheers,
Joerg