I am having trouble using hooks to attach muscles for medical animations. Sometimes they work but sometimes they seems to stop working. If anyone has any ideas on a way I could make shoulder muscles move with the bones, I would greatly appreciate it. Presently I am learning rigging so I can move muscle insertions and origins (red arrows where they connect on the bones) to simulate surgeries that help people regain movement after never injury induced paralysis. Sometimes a surgeon will relocate a healthy muscle to another location. Any ideas are greatly appreciated!
Thanks! Jim (This is a high poly version of the mesh - the ones I rig are retopologized)
You can do the same thing with an armature object and an Armature modifier.
If you use free floating bones, which are bones without a parent or at least not connected to their parents (it’s a setting that you turn on and off), plus use either envelope weights or hand-painted weights, you can move, rotate and scale those bones around as if they were hooks.
Without knowing exactly the context of your scene and why the hooks are having that problem, it’s at least another approach you can try.
The name of this technique is “skinning” and you can learn more about it here:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/rigging/armatures/skinning/index.html
Thanks! I will study skinning. I think the way DanPro rigs an eyelid might be a similar effect.
I think I solved my problem with hooks - they don’t seem to want to have their influence modified with weight paint unless the vertices have been assigned as a vertex group.