I am new to houdini. I have started setting up mu muscle and tissue setup with the help of the available tutorial on the sidefx website. I am trying to understand some of the bottlenecks, limitation and also the prep needed for the inputs on the muscle setup.

The animated bone cache that i have from my animation is intersecting on many frames mostly on the shoulder to ribcage area. And while simulating my muscle seems to be breaking/ blasting like anything. I want to understand, to bring out a decent output from the muscle do we need to keep the animated bone cache clean. Like without any bone to muscle intersection and also keeping necessary gaps between the bone for the muscle to settle in. While simulating, my humerus bone seems to be breaking too much inside into the muscle which results in blasted muscles.

Any insight on this would be of a great help for me. Thanks in advance.

Yes, unfortunately non-intersecting bone animation is always a prerequisite for good muscle sims. If you have no option of cleaning up the animation, your best bet is to disable collisions on the muscles in the affected area. You can do this with a point wrangle with the following snippet:


And then specify the relevant muscles in the Group parameter of the point wrangle.