MUSCLE SYSTEMS & TECH INFO

[MDuffy]

I don't know if you can set up a really good muscle system with just what is in Maya. There is a book called "Maya Feature Creature Creations" which talks about muscle and skin systems with just the tools in Maya. I recently ran across a Thesis paper by Amaury Aubel which is really cool (http://vrlab.epfl.ch/~aubel/), but it will require coding new nodes in Maya to pull it off (I hope to tackle this in the near future, time permitting). The paper makes a good read anyways, as it talks about the different approaches that have been tried and a lot of the pitfalls in creating such a system.

The problem with creating muscles with just the tools in Maya is that you can get a pretty good deformation going on a muscle, but it winds up being a HUGE tree of nodes for just a single muscle. Multiply that by the number of muscles you plan to simulate, and the prospect of creating and managing all those nodes becomes extremely daunting.

I recently tried doing a muscle rig with simple stretchy bones. Unfortunately you can't get good deformation with a single bone per muscle, since muscles twist a lot. So you have to use several bones along the chain. But then the number of bones you have to weight starts growing a huge amount, and weighting becomes a nightmarish task. I didn't try weighting bones to only the muscle geometry, and then using that muscle geometry to drive the skin though. That might be more manageable. I wound up abandoning this rigging attempt because it looked like writing new nodes for Maya would be much more manageable to setup and maintain; so I'm not attempting such a rig again until I have time to write/develop the new nodes.

Good luck with this, and please keep us all updated on your progress.

Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

[skello]

Thanks for replying Mike
I got a really good bones reference book today called "Atlas of the human skeleton" full of actual photographs of skeletons so i'm set to start.
I'm downloading Amaury Aubels thesis..i hope its not too technical but i think it will be :D.
I'm going to avoid using bones to deform the muscles and rather make use of morphs set driven keys and clusters. That way i will have the same number of bones as skeletons..(we'll see) my goal is not to use any weighing if possible..thus the muscles will be linked to the skeleton whick will be in turn linked to the basic bones rig.
Do you forsee me running into any serious problems using that method?.
OK..reference scannig time!!:wip:

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