Wobbly Wiggler

Wobbly Wiggler (WW) is a Blender add-on for adding jiggle simulation on top of animated bones.

Demo of same animation with and without jiggle

Tired of manually adding secondary motion to your character? Wobbly Wiggler will do it for you.

Demo of same animation with and without jiggle

Location

In the right sidebar of Blender's 3D View > Tools Tab > Wobbly Wiggler panel The Tools category can be changed in WW preferences.

Demo of jiggle applied to AutoRig Pro rig. Optional translation and roll jiggle can be toggled. All simulated in Interactive mode.

How To Use - Quick Start

  • Enter armature pose mode and select a few bones,
  • In Wobbly Wiggler Panel > Click [+] button to assign jiggle physics,
  • Press Run Spring (the animation must be playing if you use 'Animated' mode - see below)

To assign new bones to an existing jiggle group, use the Assign Jiggle to bones button from the WW Menu.

Simulation Modes

Jiggle Physics can be run in two modes:

  • Interactive - good for real-time mouse interaction with jiggle bones. No need to play animation - animated sim will often look choppy in Interactive mode.
  • Animated - it works only when animation is playing. Useful for rendering animation.

Note: Bone simulation when: action baking or during render, won't work in Interactive mode. Wobbly Wiggler built-in Bake Wiggle operator will automatically use Animated mode.

Jiggle Settings

Effect of adjusting mass, stiffness, damping, and gravity on the resulting simulation. Simulated in 'Interactive' mode.

Note: Higher stiffness (or lower mass) results in increased oscillation frequency.

Note: Due to the implementation of the physics solver, even if damping is set to 0, there will be some energy loss in the system.

Jiggle Influence

This slider can be animated to mute the jiggle effect at specific frames. For example, in the video below, it is muted at fist impact to make the motion feel snappier.

Left: full jiggle influence. Notice how the spine and arm movements feel too soft and damped, due to jiggle over-relaxing the movement.
Right: jiggle influence was muted at fist impact and at the beginning of the spine moving forward, resulting in snappier motion.

Wind

You can use an empty as a wind source. Wind strength and direction can be animated. The wind noise feature works only in Animated mode.

Demo of how wind can affect jiggle bones. Demo uses Animated mode.

With Wind Influence, you can control how much wind affects the selected jiggle group. This allows you to disable the wind effect for fingers.

Note: Wind Noise effect won't work in Interactive mode (noise amplitude is calculated based on frame number).

Translation Jiggle

Demo of translation jiggle on character root bone (pelvis)

Note: Translation jiggle works only on unconnected bones (bones without a parent or with a disconnected parent).

Roll Jiggle

Enables roll axis wiggle (twist around the bone's local Y axis).

Demo of roll jiggle on the character's root bone (pelvis)

Maximum Angle

Limits the maximum angle of jiggle bone rotation. Set it to 0.0 to disable the angle limit.

Demo of applying a maximum angle limit on finger bones to prevent them from spreading too much.

Collisions

Wobbly Wiggler supports bone-to-bone, bone-to-mesh, and bone-to-collection collisions.

Bones (finger) to mesh (sphere) collisions. Tweaking the bone envelope size helps achieve proper collision distances.

Bone-to-bone collisions. Use the Assign Collisions to Bone button to enable these kinds of collisions.

Bones Envelope Bone collision shape and distances are defined by its envelope properties: head radius, tail radius, and envelope (works as an additional collision margin).

To edit envelopes for multiple selected bones, WWiggler provides two helper sliders:

  • Bone Radius
  • Envelope

See bottom of 'Collisions' section on image below.

Bones Start You can quickly visualize bone envelopes by using the Capsule icon button. Press it again to reset bone rendering to its original state.

Physics presets

You can create multiple physics presets in Wobbly Wiggler using the Presets button, marked in red in the image below.

Jiggle Presets

From the Presets popover you can add, remove, or refresh physics presets. You can also rename the currently selected preset by clicking on the pen icon.

Baking Jiggle Animation

WWiggler has an operator for baking jiggle physics into an animation action.

Baking jiggle simulation on top of the rig's 'Jump' action into a new separate action called Wiggle. The new action's keyframes are completely separate from the Jump animation.

Baking Options

This operator is similar to Blender's built-in Bake Action operator, but with additional options specific to jiggle simulation.

Jiggle Presets

  • Action: create a new action or combine with an existing one

  • New Action Name A warning will be displayed if an action with the same name already exists.

  • Combine with overridden Action / Replace overridden Action Buttons to choose whether to merge with or overwrite an existing action with the same name.

  • Action Slot For new Blender 4.5 slotted actions

  • Cyclic Simulation: Indicates that the simulation will loop continuously.

    • Warmup Cycles: When 'Cyclic Simulation' is enabled, this will run the simulation N times before the final bake to stabilize the results.

  • Bones Dropdown to select which bones to bake (e.g., All Jiggle Bones).

  • Rotation / Location / Scale Choose which transformation properties to bake: rotation, location, and/or scale.

  • Clear Constraints after Bake Button to remove constraints from bones after baking.

Note: If you are redoing a bake onto a previously baked Wiggle action, make sure to use the Replace overridden Action option. Otherwise, you will end up with the new simulation being run on top of the previously baked jiggle.

Make Action Cyclic

Operator for blending the start and end of an animation. It uses position, angle, position velocity, and angular velocity blending for more realistic results—based on the inertialization technique used in Gears of War. It works with any action, not just those created with Wobbly Wiggler.

The ending of the Punch animation does not match the beginning. Using the 'Make Action Cyclic' operator blends the animation start with the end.

Make Cyclic - Options

Make Action Cyclic

  • Action: choose action to make cyclic
  • Blend toward Start/End: 0 - blend ending keyframes toward the start, 1 - blend starting keyframes toward the end, 0.5 - blend equally toward start and end
  • Blend Range: Length of blending in frames. A longer range results in a smoother transition, but it also affects more of the animation.

WW Menu

The Wobbly Wiggler menu is located next to the listing of jiggle groups. It contains several useful operators. WW Menu

  • Assign Jiggle to bones Assigns the active jiggle physics preset to the selected bones.

  • Remove Jiggle from bones Removes jiggle physics from the selected bones.

  • Select bones in group Selects all bones that belong to the active jiggle group.

  • Remove Jiggle Constraints Deletes jiggle-related constraints from the selected group.

  • Convert Jiggle Group to Quat Converts the rotation of bones that belong to the active jiggle group to quaternion mode.

  • Move Up / Move Down Changes the order of the jiggle group in the list.

  • Use Capsules Collisions Uses higher quality capsule-shaped bone-to-bone collisions.

  • Draw Debug Displays debug visualization for jiggle physics. Visible in the image above.

  • Write Jiggle on Simulation End Writes jiggle simulation into bone transformations when the simulation finishes.

  • Keep Wiggle Constraints Retains wiggle constraints after the simulation is stopped. They will be muted instead of being removed.