CFX
Muscles are essential in the CFX pipeline as they simulate realistic skin deformation, adding natural motion and volume beneath the surface of a character. They enhance believability by driving secondary motion and providing a more lifelike connection between skeletal animation and tissue dynamics.
OTiS
The new Otis solver is a specialized, GPU-accelerated soft tissue simulation tool designed for high-performance muscle and tissue dynamics. It delivers FEM-like material quality but runs significantly faster, making it ideal for complex character simulations. To help artists get started quickly, it comes with a full set of production-quality muscles and tissue setups ready for use.
Soft Tissue
The new Otto muscle and tissue simulation recipe lets character effects artists quickly achieve high-quality, natural motion by running muscles and tissue together in a single, unified simulation with minimal setup.
Skin Deform
The new skin deform tool with built-in skin sliding can be applied after muscle and tissue simulations, providing more natural, global deformations and supports distribution on the farm for faster, efficient processing.
Fascia Simulation
The new fascia simulation generates a low-resolution tet mesh that naturally holds muscles together while preserving their soft, realistic behavior, reducing excessive jiggle and enabling cohesive, stable muscle and tissue motion with minimal setup.
Collision Detection
The solver’s robust collision detection and response ensures stable, natural results in challenging areas like knees, armpits, and the torso, allowing muscle and tissue simulations to handle complex interactions cleanly and reliably out of the box.
Muscle Adjust Volume
The muscle adjust volume tool helps CFX artists improve muscle simulation quality by managing intersections, enforcing minimum thickness in thin areas, and refining models, ensuring clean, predictable results across any character setup.
Muscle Activation
The activation system automatically generates tension lines per muscle, eliminating tedious manual setup while providing greater control and customization through dedicated properties and parameters for more efficient, flexible simulations.
Configure
The Otis configure system automatically sets up muscle-to-muscle and muscle-to-tissue constraints, ensuring natural deformation and transferring muscle motion effectively to the tissue and skin without altering the approved character model.
Muscle Transfer
A muscle transfer toolset allows character effects artists to easily transfer full muscle and tissue setups from one character to another, enabling quick simulations on new characters with minimal adjustments and supporting an expanding library of production-ready assets.
Transfer Setup
By combining the Otto muscle tissue simulation with the muscle transfer setup, character effects artists can quickly generate a fully functional muscle simulation for new characters, with only minimal tweaks needed.
Extreme Transfers
The muscle transfer tools handle even extreme character transformations, allowing artists to adjust bone geometry, refine muscle alignment, and manage areas where muscles shouldn't transfer, ensuring clean, accurate simulations across varied body shapes.
Refinements
Machine learning can help characters achieve realistic, volume-preserving motion without needing heavy simulations every time. These can be applied while you animate to clean up deformations. Shot Sculpt lets you manually refine the surface to get just the right look for a shot.
Armature Capture
The armature capture and deform system automatically binds meshes to skeletons in a resolution-independent way, delivering higher-quality deformations than basic bone setups and easily integrating with ML-trained deformers for even more natural, volume-preserving results.
Training ML
The ML training workflow allows character effects artists to generate an ML model from full CFX simulations, enabling the model to accurately replicate simulated deformations with high fidelity and reduced computational cost.
ML in APEX
The ML deformation models are easy to integrate into the APEX Animate workflow, delivering high-quality, volume-preserving deformations at real-time speeds and producing realistic, fleshy motion even in extreme or complex poses.
Shot Sculpt
The sculpt-over-time workflow lets CFX artists quickly fix rig or simulation issues by creating sculpted corrections as editable clips, blending them seamlessly over time without re-running full simulations.