Information about Creating Muscle System

[bartrobinson]

There was a Maya 5 book I checked out that went into most of that. At least much more than any other book I have ever seen. Hopefully the concepts could tranfer to other software that have similar capabilities. This wasn't it, but it looks like it might be close or better. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735713448/ref=pd_sxp_elt_l1/002-0956344-9787233

[steveblake]

Thers was a nice tutorial on sliding muscles here (http://zj.digitalrendering.com/html/maya_download.htm )

Site seems to be down today, naybe check back in a day or so...

[loked]

What software you using??
Forgive me for asking, but I just presume it's not maya cause it's not in the maya forum and I'm strictly a maya user, so I cant help if its not :)

If it is, then I should be able to help ;)

Oh yeah and the link to that book is a maya book and it doesn't really help you get real muscle sliding and that sort of true muscle behaviour. This is something that would require you to do some API or some really hectic work in Maya.



later:wavey:
loked

[Macj]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I'm using Maya, so I guess I should have put this thread in the Rigging Maya section. But yes, yes, I must know how to make a muscle system. I'm willing to do anything to make this work, it means that much to me. So if you could help out in any way, that would be great.

-Josh

[loked]

Hey Josh,

Alright, Do you want to make something with existing maya tools and fairly quickly, or is it something long term where you would be willing to get into things like API.

This discussion has been had and gone into quite a lot of detail over at http://www.jonhandhisdog.com

I would suggest you go over there and search under the general questions forum for the thread titled "Any chance one of us geeks can build muscle" or something like that :)

There are a lot of links and stuff that will give you previous siggraph notes and just general workflows for muscles.

Just to warn you ahead of time, there are really 2 major hurdles with muscles, the first which is probably the easiest is getting the muscles themselves to react like muscles eg, volume maintenance, tension, jiggle..etc. This one we've pretty much dealt with on that thread. The second is getting the skin to react to the muscles. You could use smooth skinning and then add them as influences, but this method can cause things to get very slow. So the other alternative is an API derformer which is okay, but doesn't allow for muscle sliding, fat detection, skin elasticity. These are all things that you would need to write a skin solver that would almost work like cloth on a collision object (very complex, only big studios with hectic programmers have this).

So jump over to that thread and check it out ;)

later:wavey:
loked

[Frogfu]

Im currently working on a muscle system utilizing Maya Dynamics and soft bodies to simulate the muscle deformations. I use the Musculo Plugin availiable from High End, written by Larry Vizoso Larry Vizoso Website (http://www.larryvizoso.com/) . Its a deformer plugin that Keeps the volume of a nurbs muscle while it flexes. The insertion and orgin points of the muscle have locators parented to bones driven by maya Joints. Kinda reverse of reality, the bones driving the muscles instead of how it really is. After the muscle groups are built and the deformer applied the skin is made a soft body and the muscles are rigid bodies that influenct the skin. It works well with a little tweaking. Ive done a few testys and am currently working on the full body simulation. Hopefully the computer won't catch fire. Hope this helps. :)

TheFu

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