Muscles in Max without Plugins

[salmonmoose]

As far as I know, most muscle simulations work as a superset of bones that work on top of a skeleton to add some realism to the animation, there is a tutorial on how to build a bicep using bones in max, which is relatively quick, and would give you a good idea of how it all works.

[cschandramouli]

Ermmm... Antrent, Bullfrog actually asked how the muscle system like Paul Neale's work and not how to fake it... I actually can see what you are meaning by a tutorial to make a biceps... I'm not sure which tut you are referring to but if I'm right you're talking about adding a squash bone between two bones so as to fake a bulge between hands or legs...

But Mr-Bullfrog, join the club... I too am wondering how you can make the muscle mesh rig the actual mesh above... According to what I see at Paul's website, the muscles are controlled by many bones which in turn control the main mesh about... My question is same as yours... How does this mesh control the main one? I've posted this same question in many threads, like eek's and Paul's but turned up with no answer yet :(

If you do get any ideas, please let me know...

Mouli

[marktsang]

most likely skin warp

mark

[metamesh]

the system that u are talkinb about is just a collection of bones used as muscles because ( in max ) they can squash and stretch like the real muscles do. after, the only thing that u have to do is to add this bones to the skin and they will do the trick for an squash and stretch effect, but what u can't do ( at least until skinwrap came to max7 ) is to add jitter ( is it the correct word?) and shaking muscles etc just with the bones used as muscles...
The screenshots that u have seen with some nice muscles they are still bones but showing another geometry on top ( but they still are bones )
I hope i helped u :)

[Mr-Bullfrog]

Hey all,

Thanks a heap for your replies. I had a feeling that it was just bones but was unsure, I take it building the muscle geometry is merely to assist in skinning the final mesh? (ie: weighting vertices until the mesh lies over the muscle geometry...)

Thanks again for all your help everyone.

-Jeremy

[Airflow]

Im not sure if they are just bones.... I have rigged with the just bones teqnique and it works up untill a point..... and you can get jiggle or flex on the bone system... you just have to set up a constraint system which connect the jiggle bone to an object with flex on it, that is parented to the rig....

[PEN]

My ears were burning so I droped in;)

Every one is going to have a character of mine soon enough to strip down and see how it works, but until then here is a tid bit.

What I'm using is bones in Max with flex, skin and skin wrap. I don't get skin sliding but I do get giggle in individual muscles.

I'm using stretchy bone and I'm skinning a proxy mesh to it. I don't skin to the bones that I don't want to giggle. I then skin wrap the same mesh to the giggle muscles bones.

Now you can skin wrap the high res model to the proxy. I also have in some cases skinned a muscle bone to a muscle bone, so that one pulls on the other.

[Airflow]

sounds insane..... I usually just throw on a few flexes onto the mesh and select verts to localise the jiggle.... if I have to I use a flex bone setup, but this slows down max... still aint worked out your muscle mesh/skin control set up.... but I played with skin wrap and its limited....

[salmonmoose]

You're releasing a rig to the public PEN? - Nice.

Looking forward to having a play with it. Have you tried using cloth to simulate skin sliding? atleast in parts of the mesh where it could be really noticable?

Airflow: I hate to be self promotional but if you're not happy with skinwrap, it may be worth having a look at cgSkin, see what you think :)

[Mr-Bullfrog]

Hey all,

Thanks for all the great replies. What little I'd used of Skin Wrap in the past was rather unsuccessful, however after trying your method Paul and reading up on Skin Wrap I've managed to get some pretty cool results first time round.

I actually found it quicker than using morph angle deformers, plus simply adding a Flex modifier to the muscle geometry has added some great jiggle to the muscle, which is fantastic as my character is rather over-weight. Thanks a heap everyone, this is a great method, and so elegantly simple!

Thanks again all!

-Jeremy

[PEN]

Just going with flex right on the mesh can work very well. I find that with a seperate object i can control it a bit better though.

All I'm really doing it trying to find other ways and see just how far I can push Max. Using Skin wrap so far on top of Skin has worked very well.

For production rigs I tend to keep them as simple as possible so as to not cause problems. One offs like the Ogre, Maxine and the new ones that I'm working on are just pushing what is possible. Doesn't mean that you should.

[CarlosA]

DISPLACE SPACWARP!!!
can't say it enough very overlooked but very powerfull.
you can use the skin warp to muscle aproched for localized jiggle. and you can also use a couple of this Displace Gizmos to get bone or sliding under the skin effect.
most common use is on eye leads so that the eyeballs can slide under the eyeleads.
cheers,
Los.

[luigi]

another way i used on the past is with volume select and push.
you can use objects like a sphere than with volume select slect the vertex for do the push, and the cool thing is you can use soft slection so the push is smootly.

i used on elbows and knees creating and sphere inside th joint and only when it rotates it move out and select vertex and push it.

is like space warp but you have the befenit of softselection ;).

[SandeepMaithani]

well.........

i tried vol sel<soft sel on the mesh and FFD sitting on top of it.........controlled by an attribute, wired to the control points .......and it works cool for me!
all breathing.....muscle deformation though its very basic what i'm doing right now....is being controlled by this setup!
and oh.........skin morph takes care of what's left1

sandy

[S-S]

PEN:

- This sounds interesting, and i guess i have tried quite similar setup some months ago (i guess i got inspired by your muscle setup images..., didn't quite know how they would move :) ); skin simple mesh, then skin wrap on top of that, and then i have used very simple "muscle objects" for skin wrap (muscle objects are transformed by strechy bones...)

- Question about not getting any sliding effect? I get some nice sliding into "skinned mesh", i just tune amount of skin sliding by tuning weights and influence in vertex level of "muscle object" in skinwrap... After that i just add flex if needed... So i'm not sure what kind of movement you mean by skin sliding... (what i get with my setup is sliding on top of skin modifier deformation, created by muscles under skin...)

- Anyway, it still isn't much more different than strechy bones in skin modifier, except sliding and jiggle. It would be nice to have curvy muscles, which could twist around bones and collide with bones and other muscles... ! :)

I did a simple demo... not very pretty but anyway :)

Muscle Setup MOV 400kb Animation (http://www.cgmill.com/ss/wip/20050916_muscle_setup.mov)

[PEN]

Looks cool S-S.

Skin sliding is really just being faked with what you are doing but most of the time that is all that is needed. Stretchy bones are the best thing going. I'll post some test stuff of Maxwell that I'm currently working on at some point.

[Airflow]

I just started playing with a similar setup and finnaly got it to work. Skinwrap is pretty useful, it give me an even better flex result than standard flex bones and skin... what Im after now is not sliding but muscle collison, so one muscle can deform another when they touch, skin morph would work well here creating targets on bone angles but if you have flex on muscles then they dont respect the position of the morph angle.... Im after somthing that works no matter....

[PEN]

Well AirFlow I think at that point you are getting into dynamic solutions that will need to be calculated. Flex isn't a robust dynamics tool, it is just for simple jiggle and just will not give you results that you are looking for.

[Airflow]

Ok, dynamics might be a bit overkill, maybe full skinmorph is the way to go....

My other question is, when you have like 4 muscles in a limb using skinwrap how the hell do you select the right vertex to control weight off... they all overlap and I get lost in the forest of verts.......

[PEN]

I run into the same problem Aitflow without a good solution yet.

[metamesh]

i have the same problem, i was trying to do an arm with bones, muscles etc, and at the end everything gets too messy inside of the skinwrap, and the deformation gets worse for every muscle that i add... ( and i was just using 2 muscles...) :(
btw does someone tried hercules from di-o-matic? just curious to see if it works well?

[Airflow]

just had a stupid idea.... what if you segment it, kinda like your making sections of skinwraps and wrap your final mesh to it.... so to get 4 muscles you skin wrap to 2 skinwraped objects each with 2 muscles.... Im gonna try it out when I get home....

[virtualmesh]

Hi, if you had ACT Pro or another muscle plugin, would you still consider using these methods within max v7 ? Would the methods listed in this thread add extra processing/memory requirements to the modifer stack of ones character as opposed to having the plugin handel the customizations ?

[metamesh]

dunno, i tried ACT 1.6 but just a bit, just playing with it...i'd like to try hercules, it seems more friendly, but anyway the name of the topic it says "without plugins" so i guess we'r going out of the topic here :)

[Promineo]

Sorry for my english.

ok, I'm working in a rig in the same way like you do, with strech bones, and giggle... :applause:
but the real problem are the sliding of the sking over the muscle, and not only that, the angle of the muscle move when you move a part of a body, with strech bones, only you have a one direction deformation. i recently read about biomechanics, and real muscles move not only in the direction of the bone, the muscles have independient movement too. Really are muscles who moves bones.

I working with the a full set of skin morph for correct the angle of the muscles but I .
I don't know how we can correct the sliding skin problem, I'm working on that. :banghead:

By now i'm finish the rig, but I'm trying ACT too.

thanks all, for the information about muscle without plugins.
Thanks a lot paul!

saludos!!

[cecofuli]

Intresting topic ;)

[PEN]

I think this is still on topic, even though it was started talking about muscles without plugins. At some point you really need to go to a custom tool of some sort to get all the control that you want. Maybe one day Max or Maya will have it all built in but it is never usualy as good as a tool that is focused on a specific task.

As for Skin sliding you just have to find ways to fake it. There are several tools that can help this in Max including stretchy bones but unless you start doing sims it isn't going to happen. The new ACT skin looks really cool, I just need to find the time to play with it and so does hurcules.

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