hey guys. been tinkering with some ideas of making a simple to use muscle tool. you make a top and bottom null and the muscle snaps into place. from there you have to adjust the shape using a few sliders ( or you might have to go within the null nodes ( Within the muscle subOP and adjust the circles there ). i wouldnt call this anywhere near finished, and im not sure how it would use inflate yet.

anyway just throwing a few ideas out. theres still lots of problems in the tool iteself ( like the muscle flipping if its stretched too much, etc. and its not as intuitive as it would be in final. ( let alone, not optimized at all ).

if anyone has comments/ improvements, theyre always welcome.

the file can be downloaded from here. ( its an apprentice file 7.0.231 )
( used winrar 3.x )
http://ambient-whisper.cgcommunity.com/images_dump/neato/muscle_test_stuff.rar [ambient-whisper.cgcommunity.com]

i have also been thinking about doing something like compression of the muscles based on a measurement of how close the top and bottom nulls are. not sure how to do that yet though.

cheerios.

Sorry I don't have time to look at your rig at the moment, but in terms of automatically finding the distance between nulls that is pretty easy, either in chops or with the dist expression. However I would suggest carving out a line from your muscle and using the measure sop, cos what you really want to know is the length of the muscle not the distance between the ends. Down side to this is it's a bit slower so you might want to make it an optional method. And be aware that measure measures the length of the control mesh not the actual curve when dealing with NURBs.