Unity Mecanim and ragdolls

Update 17 May 2014: If you're interested in physics simulation and character animation, check also our latest research. Also, please note that Mecanim has had some changes since the original post, and now the script could be implemented more elegantly. I also haven't tested the script with different characters - the comments suggest that some characters with different bone structure might not work out of the box.

Sharing a Unity project with a RagdollHelper.cs script that can be used to turn a Mecanim character into a ragdoll and then back. Using the script is simple: there's just one public property called "ragdolled", which can be set to true or false. When the property is changed from true to false, the script blends from the ragdolled pose to a get up animation. This is illustrated in the video below.

Transitioning from Mecanim animation to a ragdoll is as easy as disabling the Animator component of the character and setting all ragdoll rigid bodies to non-kinematic. The reverse is more complex, and my solution is not without kludges, as Mecanim doesn't allow as low level control of the animation as Unity's older animation system. The main problems are that one can't use scripting to enforce an immediate state transition without a blend, and apparently one can't also add states programmatically into an animation controller.

In the old animation system, one could create a new animation clip from the ragdoll's current pose, turn of ragdolling and blend the animation from the created clip to a recovery animation. In Mecanim this is not possible, and after turning Mecanim back on, we have to manually lerp the hip position and slerp all body part rotations back towards the last ragdolled pose in LateUpdate() to achieve a smooth blending. Additionally, we have to wait some frames for Mecanim to transition to the get up animation while using LateUpdate() to move the pose back to the ragdolled one, and then read back the get up animation start body orientation and position, and update Mecanim character's root so that the animated orientation and position match the ragdolled one as well as possible. In the old system we could just update the character transforms with a single script command according to a specific frame of a given animation, and then read whatever info we need. Actually we could possibly use the legacy animation system for that, but then the script would need additional handles to the animation etc., so it seems there's no really simple and beautiful way. One could also perhaps use an editor script to precompute the info.

Here's the Unity project as a zip file in case someone finds it useful: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8lAtheEAvgmYUlqX1FjNm84cVU/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-kVdY0_KU-BRQP9xZibN0Fw

Open the test scene, click with mouse on a body part to add an impact to the character, press space to make it get back up.

Update 5 Dec 2013: Today I noticed that Unity 4.3 has added the Animator.Update() which could be used to implement the ragdoll to animation blend more elegantly without the LateUpdate() trickery. I'll have to update this example when I have time.