Muscle TK vs. cMuscle (comet digital)

[ChaosBlackMagician]

i chose and like Mtk, never tried comet but so far mtk on my complex rig worked out to my liking,

[Osaires]

Not sure why, but got som nasty problems with mtk, all my vertical muscels flipp, (the workaround it to use the tree point muscel thingy)

and its realy realy slow (1 min per frame), i switch to using influence objects insted, it gives me much better feedback (1 sec per frame).

would be interesting to try out the cmuscel system, it look realy nice

[supergenius]

I’d have to say that if you need the flexibility to rig today’s complex characters, that cMuscle is what you need hands down.



I’ve used both and here’s why I think cMuscle is the one to use:



1) FLEXIBILITY:

cMuscle let’s you adjust a multitude of different “skin attributes” such as stickiness, sliding, jiggle, relaxing, smoothing, wrinkling etc. on a point-by-point basis for EACH MUSCLE. You can paint these skin attributes as well.



MuscleTK only has a muscle assignment value (which from the last time I used it can only be painted on and off). The point assignment to the muscles is automatic and is based on proximity of the mesh/skin point to the muscle (kind of like a Maya “wrap” deformer). The only way I could change the way a point was assigned to a muscle was either to reposition the muscle or skin geometry, which is a total pain!



2) SUPERIOR SKIN DEFORMER (Basically same point as above)

cMuscle gives you stickiness, sliding, jiggle, relaxing, smoothing, wrinkling etc. This deformer can even be used on non-muscle rigs, say if you just want to create a “jiggly” object.

MuscleTK just has the amount of skin deformer effect.



3) SPEED:

With any muscle skin system, you are going to get slower calculation with the more muscles you have and the denser your skin mesh is. However, cMuscle has built in attributes to quickly “disable” calculation heavy attributes like “sliding” very quickly. At any point you can disable those calculations, edit something, then turn all the calculations back on.



4) BETTER DOCUMENTATION AND TUTORIALS

cMuscle comes with a lot of help documentation and example files. Very fast to get up and running creating muscles/skins quickly. MuscleTK has some docs and movie files, but they aren’t very thorough.



5) MISCELLANEOUS



cMuscle has better muscle building tools. Includes tools for quickly constructing valid muscles to use on your rig with the cMuscle skin deformer. Also let’s you quickly assign muscle attributes like jiggle very quickly.



cMuscle has a tool for converting skin clusters to cMuscle sticky weights. What’s neat about this is that this allows you to take some of your older rigs and muscle them up. You just have to convert the smooth skin clusters to cMuscle sticky weights, then continue with adding muscles and assigning skin attributes.



cMuscle has a very nice “caching” tool. This allows you to cache (or store all the point movement data) to an internal node or external file. This speeds up playback of the deformations and allows you to pass off the file to someone else (for rendering) who does not have the full cMuscle plugin (they would just need the free cMuscle cache “reader”).



So that’s my opinion. I rig character’s in Maya for a living and I would only recommend something I would use myself and cMuscle is it. For the money it is a steal for sure. If you have any questions comparing the two, feel free to ask, I’ll try to answer them as best as I can.



Tim Coleman

Rigging Supervisor

Giant Killer Robots (see our work in “Fantastic Four” on July 8th)

[michaeljr]

well I was on the beta list and there were a few "big named" fellows that had used MuscleTK and then Comet Muscle, if you go to www.cometdigital.com (http://www.cometdigital.com) and read through their quotes you can decided for yourself which might be better, at least in their o.ps.

but remember you are comparing a a 50$ plugin made by a group of people to a 250$ plugin developed by a single rigger for riggers who has worked on movies like Robots, Ice Age 2, and now Ant Bully.

I do know that cMuscle does "true" skin sliding and is faster from what I hear.

[michaelcomet]

I wasn't going to post but I felt the urge...obviously I'm somewhat biased and I have not actually used MTK.

But...from what I have heard...

MuscleTK is as mentioned above a simple deformer for polys that just does a sticky weight sort of thing. It's one weight that is either on or off, and you paint the skin to the muscle, that's it.

The cMuscleSystem by contrast has:
1. Sticky Weights...this is the part most like MTK. Everything else is different/extra.

2. Color weight painting...good for see small weights.

3. Sliding Weights. This is true separate sliding collision

4. Direction Weights. Helps control slide or other features

5. Per-Point Skin Jiggle Weights. This gives you true addition fat jiggle on top of anything the muscles are already doing. As mentioned this and all these other features here can be applied to objects that aren't even for muscle def. For example you could apply this to a characters clothing to make it jiggly if you wanted, or to a robot rigs hose to make it jiggle etc...

6. Relax Weights. This gives a more more natural effect of sliding or jiggle and any other deformation.

7. Smooth Weights. This is actually a HUGE bonus for the plugin. It's similar to relax but does even more true "smoothing". Good again for conjunction with muscle sliding and such, but also for just other objects. For example I have used the cMuscleSystem with smoothing on characters faces that were rigged with just basic skinning and blendshapes for a facial rig. The smoothing help fix any areas that might pinch or crease badly from imperfect weights or blendshape combinations.

8. Point Caching. Lets you step through your animation and cache it out, for faster playback during lighting/rendering etc so render stations don't need to buy a full copy, since a free cacheOnly version of the plugin is included. Once again this can be applied on ANY object. So you could have a character deformed with some other techniques, and then simply put this on top for caching purposes.

9. Pipeline Integration. I work full time as a rigging supervisor, so I understand the needs of making a tool work in a feature film pipeline. The plugin is designed to work in conjunction with any other Maya deformers and tools, and the workflow is similar to skinning so artists can quikcly ramp up and learn it.

Also note as mentioned many of these are "per-muscle". The ones that fit this are sticky, sliding, direction (per direction node). The others are "per-point". In addition each muscle also has it's own jiggle type controls as needed also.

To be honest I have had a number of people, including rigging leads at some other major studios telling me I could have charged four times as much as it does now for what it does. From what I gather cMuscleSystem is vastly more powerful and flexible than MTK.

Some other smaller points also:

- Works with Polys, NURBs and with a bit more work SubD's. Definitely best with polys.
- Can automatically convert skinClusters to cMuscleSystem deformers.
- Can use any NURBs object as a muscle.
- Can use any sculpted NURBs or Poly object as a sliding collision object
- Has a "shrinkWrap" mode for sliding more for use as a modeling tool.

Ok I could probably go on but I will stop...

Thanks for reading,
Michael

[Iconoklast]

you know, if you released:
Has a "shrinkWrap" mode for sliding more for use as a modeling tool.
as a seperate, modeling, tool, you'd have a lot of friends.. more than you may already have now!

[DangerAhead]

Yeah, i noticed some of the testimonials from Thuriot among others. They definitely have "sliding weight."

I'll buy it (after pay day) and give it the once over. I have just the project in mind.

Thanks (esp. Tim and Michael) for taking time to answer my question. I noticed you posted about this on Joe Harkins' site too.

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