I have Autorigged a quadruped (dog) and plan to provide that rig with a full set of muscles to move the skin. In the end, I want to make something like the tiger in this video (https://vimeo.com/235324315), which was done with the ZIVA plugin for Maya.

I see online that Houdini can do muscles with FEM or Vellum, but is an Autorig setup suitable as basis for such complex rigging? Or should I rather build the rig from scratch, bone by bone, controller by controller? Any opinion on either approach?

Thanks,

You can link muscles to anything you want. So it's up to you to decide whether you use autorig or build from scratch. I built my rig for the bear from scratch and had to skip some elements like align IK and FK due to lack of knowledge.
Anyway, you can tweak autorig as you like.

Thanks @Hige for your comment. Of course I can use both approaches, but the Autorig setup implies that I need to amend the geoskin every time I tweak my bone hierarchy. I could image that introducing muscles will mesh up the geoskin and it would therefore be easier to do so in a fully controlled self-built rig (like in the cat tutorial by Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen (https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/cat-quad-rigging/). But that is a hell of a lot more work than doing an Autorig.

Maybe Michael Goldfarb can comment on this? And I would also be anxious to see the new tutorial on capturing and weighting and such that you pre-announced; any idea of the release date for that?

Thanks guys,