Bullet Physics and the Blender Game Engine - Mastering Blender - page 607

Controlling an Armature
It would be nice to be able to use ragdoll physics to control an armature, in order to deform a mesh for anim-
ation. In this section, I'll show you a simple way to do this. The example is a little backward; ordinarily you
would begin with a mesh character, create a ragdoll armature to fit the character, and then set up the ragdoll
as in the previous section, so that the ragdoll's shape matches the character. In this case, the ragdoll came first.
Nevertheless, the way to control the armature is the same.
1. The first thing to do is to add empties to key points, where the tips of the bones will be, as shown in
Figure8-65 . Parentthe“hand”and“foot”emptiestothelowerarmsandlegs,respectively,thekneeemp-
ties to the upper legs, the elbow empties to the upper arms, and the hip empties both to Midriff.
An easy way to position empties is to select the vertices around where the empty should go and snap the
cursor to selection by pressing Shift+S (as shown in Figure 8-66 for positioning the 3D cursor at the end
of the left arm), and then add the empty in Object mode ( Figure 8-67 ) and parent it to the body part that
should control it ( Figure 8-68 ) .