Howdy,
I watched a few videos related to Houdini's muscle system, but I didn't dive into it as of yet. Having some experience with creature/animal creation, I have some considerations/concerns about this topic.

The one that's bugging me right now is related to muscle “awareness”, more precisely, whether there's a way, provided by default or a custom method that doesn't require a huge r&d, to have muscles be aware of other muscles. Just like skin is sliding over muscles, groups of muscles slide over each other. Provided that they're modeled pretty accurately to the real thing, can one make them also interact accurately, i.e, be aware of the relaxed/tensed neighboring muscles.
Right now, no solution on the market (Ziva for Maya, or w/r it's called, included), seems to address this. Of course, I might be misinformed about this and other systems might address this, but I didn't find any info about it.

As someone that is very interested in bio-mecanics but don't have the experience, time or ability to create custom solutions, I'm interested to know what off the shelf solutions are best as of now, for achieving a credible muscle/skin that doesn't prioritize muscle jiggling (muscle interactions with other groups of muscles is much more important) as the most important factor for creating a realistic animation of an organic entity.

Moin,

I, too, am very interested in this topic and actually have given up pretty quickly on understanding the depths of Houdini's muscle system, when it didn't seem to follow a “biological” approach but a purely “what you get is what counts” idea. My experience with movie animation so far indicates that “physically/biologically correct behaviour” is of no concern, only “make it look good” is what counts. I am frequently discouraged by this.

What I assume you could do - but it's not “comfortable” - is to layer the simulation. Deal with the fundamental, least moving muscle first, bake the simulation and add the sliding muscle elements on top. I feel like it might be faster to do it all manually then anyway, but that's the best idea I have right now.

Subscribing to this topic anyway!

Marc

malbrecht
My experience with movie animation so far indicates that “physically/biologically correct behaviour” is of no concern, only “make it look good” is what counts. I am frequently discouraged by this.

Ans it doesn't even look good in some cases (if not most), but maybe my expectations are unreasonable. Sure, in fast paced action scene with lots of mblur and cuts or hairy/fantastic creatures it's less important, but I've seen lots of commercials with real animals ruined by bad muscle sims (and poor modeling of said animal, but that's another subject).

Layering the sims, seems on paper doable, but like you said, very impractical.
I guess I should roll up my sleeves and dive into creating an actual animal animation project and see how much can I squeeze out of the current system, before I can feel confident to propose feature improvements.