How do I make a rigged character dent or get squeeze by other objects?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Can this be done in Blender? Having a rigged character get additionally deformed as it’s made with soft body physics? I want to have a character lay on a flat surface and have some amount to flatten or like the video have a ball bounce off a character making a dent, or have a character pinch their own skin. I know how to do this with shape keys but how cool would it be to have the character get dented or squeezed. All I see is for tutorials are objects without a rig get softbody effects.

In my case using a Rigify character I want it to get deformations from external influences and self collision. I found nothing yet, thinking maybe this is not doable.

Can it be done and how?

#2

Generally, if I want to add softbody physics to (part) of a rigged character, I’ll use a mesh deform modifier, with “dynamic” enabled, parent the mesh deformer to an appropriate bone, and then give the mesh deformer soft body physics. Of course, hide the deformer from renders, goes to its own collection of stuff I don’t usually want to look at.

I’d recommend doing all that, but it’s not even strictly necessary-- you can just assign some verts (likely, almost all verts) to a goal group and use soft body physics directly after an armature modifier. It’s just not something I’d recommend doing, because 1) you’re running slow-as-dirt physics on many more verts than you need to and 2) the biggest tool you have to tune soft body physics is the topology of the soft body.

1 Like
#3

Since I’m always looking for the fastest computational results, therefore I would use a mesh deform like a cage around what I would want deformed and set the cage to soft body physics. OK! I’ll try it tonight and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks bandages for answering my question.