In this tutorial will try to explain you how to use Ragdoll and Reactor Water for floating the body over water effect.

Step 1: Create a water object from the reactor toolbar in the top viewport and make the subdivisions to 50 x 50. Increase the Min ripple and Max ripple values to higher number, I choose 30 and 500 respectively. Turning on depth is not necessary for this tutorial but if you creating a wakes from a moving boat then its good that you enable the depth.


Now if you render water then you can’t see anything in the render because this is a space warp and space warp can’t render. So create a plane in the top viewport, increase the number of width and length segments and bind with the reactor water.

Step 2: Create a ragdoll. In the utilities panel, click the maxscript button and then click Run script button. Now search for the ragdoll script (rctRagdollScript) in the 3dsmax/scripts folder and click open.


Step 3: Now Ragdoll dialog box will open. Click the Create Humanoid button and a biped shaped character will create in the viewport. Now click the Constrain Humanoid button in the dialog box and this will create constraints between the parts of the character.


Step 4: Now click the reactor button in the utilities panel and increase the number of end frame to around 200 and done same for the timeline. Now press Preview in Window button and play the animation in the reactor window. If you like then you can give a different mass to the parts of the body. For fun remove the RagdollCsolver and play the animation in the reactor window. Now parts of the ragdoll are not connected so some of them will go down in the water and some starting to float like boxes.


That’s it. Click on Create Animation in the reactor toolbar or button in the utilities panel.

Reactor will ponder your animation for a while. Sometimes the only problem is, the ripples are barely visible. Select the WSM Binding, and increase the Scale Strength until you get the effect you’re looking for.


You can also try adding a Displace modifier and use the Waves procedural map for more ripples. Make some materials, and voíla!

This tutorial first published in the CGArena Magazine August Issue.