Bones Pro 4 resurrected

#21

Hi Metamesh!
thanks for the thoughts, that is what get many times a day in my mailbox, as suggestions for the next release.
The idea of having Muscle System in BonesPro is indeed very attractive.

I have the following question:

  1. I have searched for the Comet Muscle in google, but save Torrent and his dead web-site, it seems this thing is either swallowed by maya or it is virtually dead. Is his muscle system now a standard part of maya (sorry i have no idea about maya)?

  2. ACT is since years virtualy dead. We all remember ACT only as a legend, since it was the first half-way working, complicated muscle system for max. There is since Max8, i think, no port anymore. Am i wrong or do you all have it in your everyday production pipe-line in use, with Max2010 64bit etc?

  3. CAT has a kind of muscle system. I must admit, i have learned it only to test the compatibility of BonesPro with CAT. I can only remember it was very complicated, so i have forgotten it the other day. If anybody have used it intensivly, maybe he can offer us more in-depth view of the features?

thanks!
best regards

#22

Hey Igor,
Yes comet muscle was bought by Autodesk and integrated and extended it into maya, if i’m not mistaken that’s what the rigging guys use here at mpc…aparently is pretty good, lots of tools to play with, nice paint tools to assign different attributes to the skin etc etc, apparently it’s a very solid and powerful tool, and in max there’s nothing like that…i think there was a dvd from digital tutors covering the maya muscles? maybe it was a gnomon one, i don’t remember, you could eventually watch it and see all it offers?..
Act as far as I know is not under development anymore…i used to work with one of the guys involved on that and yes, it seems like is dead…

cat has some sort of muscle system, haven’t used for anything really, just to play and make some tests, but is not great, it feels more like a toy than a real serious muscle system ( but as i said i haven’t use it for anything serious…)

cheers!

#23

thanks metamesh for the infos! Now we have a kind of complete overview what is on the market and what is still missing.
I will post here the update to muscles as soon as i am allowed to talk more :slight_smile:
thanks!
best regards

#24

So, what is the knock on Hercules?

#25

I tried hercules a long time ago when it first was released i think , I quite liked the muscle primitives it had, very fast, with nice dinamics etc, what i didn’t like it was the way to assign those muscles to the mesh, I don’t exactly remember how that was working but i remember it was a bad solution to assign it and at the end it was frustrating… :frowning: but the muscles primitives, as i said before, worked really nice

#26

This muscle conversation interests me quite a lot.

Metamesh is right, the Maya muscle system is very impressive. Some demonstration videos at Autodesk site (I’ve found particularly impressive the muscle self collision):
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=13587712&linkID=9242256

However, IMHO sliding muscle is kind of a myth to me, unless someone proves me otherwise. For it to work correctly the muscles shouldn’t be modeled like we are used to (in max or sculped with displace), they must be created only through muscle deformers. That would be a massive amount of work and to get that to look good the mesh should be very dense slowing things down a lot. All muscle demos I’ve seen always show clean meshes with no muscle modeled by hand.

Thinking this way, CAT muscle followed the right path. Because it’s muscles are skinned to the mesh just like bones, there is no sliding going on (but it has options to do so AFAIK).

One thing I never found on sliding muscle solutions is a proper falloff in the collision region. I don’t know about the Maya one, though. But usually they try to solve this problem with relax, but it’s slow and deforms the mesh even on the rest state.

Regards,
Jr.

#27

i havent done a real thorugh test on it but the conversion from BP to skin works GREAT on this new 4.1 update.

well done guys

Nildo

#28

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