I am very proud to present you the first stable version of my Blender Muscle Tools Add On.
Finally i finished making a muscle creator add on in Blender and this with great results.
Take a look at the Demo Video and the Tutorial and you will see how useful and helpful it is while you are
animating your character
I really don’t think this forum should become an advertising space for blendermarket stuff, whatever that site intends to become.
But, when advertising your product, You should at least show the benefits of it. your video doesn’t show that at all. There is a character which doesn’t have realistic muscle structure at all in the first place, and also, it’s too fast to actually see any effect. Actually both compared videos seem to have the same quality…
Don’t take this bad, but I just think the presentation video should be improved, so ppl can see what the addon can actualy do…
How is that misrepresentation? Blendercookie market addons have to be purchased from the market. None of them are included in regular blender releases. Where is the misrepresentation? The post clearly and truthfully states where this addon is available.
To the other point, I agree that video does not do a very good job of demonstrating the addon’s capabilities or benefits. Blink and you’ll miss the tiny jiggle afforded by the muscle system. Your demo video should be a showcase designed to convince people to purchase and use your addon, not a 30 second proof-of-concept test. Especially considering the amount of work muscle setup appears to entail from your tutorial video, it’s going to take a clear demonstration to convince people that it’s worth the money as well as the time and effort.
Thread title : BLENDER OFFICIAL MUSCLE SIMULATOR ADD ON(available on Blender Market)
How is this blender official? Blender Foundation are not involved with this addon at all.
@KHorseman Calling it the “OFFICIAL MUSCLE SIMULATOR ADD ON” is misrepresentation - as far as I see there is nothing linking it to BF projects, nor is it even a part of addons-contrib, meaning it’s independent and therefore nothing official.
I also agree, the dinosaur thing is a terrible example, too fast and doesn’t convince me this add-on is necessary.
Otherwise it looks interesting and possibly even useful.
Really bad presentation of this add-on; I understand the general idea behind this system, but without solid soft body-like simulation (and Blender’s one is not that reliable) and much better Shrinkwrap (I guess 3ds Max Skinwrap does the trick much better) this system cannot work well. And this video is a proof of my opinion, unfortunatelly.
Thank you all for the detailed critique:
Cause the add on has been more improved and updated later too the tutorial is not completely up to date.
I think i will make a new one perhaps the function of this add on becomes clearer.
(Not only Slide Bind but Sticky Bind is also available)
If you want to test this for free in a constrained way here is a link how you can use this method another way
The add on is just for making the usage more uniform and easy.
Coloremblem: I agree with the criticism about your use of ‘OFFICIAL’, you should probably change that, as this creates the illusion that the Blender Foundation is involved (and additionally this might be more than ‘just’ an addon)
Eh, I was just reading that as “official release of this addon”, as in “I had a WIP thread for this, now here’s the real thing” but I suppose putting the word official after “Blender” and not before is confusing.
Anyway.
coloremblem it’s not the tutorial that needs fixing, it’s the demo. I’ll watch a tutorial on how to use it after I decide that it’s useful. I need to see some clear, slow demonstration of the visual effect of this addon under multiple circumstances. How well does it work on humanoid arms, how well does it work on back or abdominal muscles? Will this addon do anything to help make face rigs look more realistic? Does the effect only look good on fast moving creatures like your running dinosaur thing, or can it help at slower speeds of motion? That type of thing. Think of how people will use it and show us that. Also, if the method you’re using is softbodies and shrinkwrap, I need a demonstration that this addon will save me significant time over setting that type of thing up myself by hand. The tutorial is just documentation; you need a better advertisement. $30 isn’t a ton of money but it isn’t something people are just going to throw down over a 22 second animation of a creature that may or may not have sort of jiggling skin but we can’t tell because it’s moving too fast.
very poor demo. as K Horseman says it doesn’t show me anything that would make me think i need this. The with addon/without addon comparisons look pretty much identical. you need to show us why this product is worth the price tag and this video just doesn’t.
I really hate the blender market. Every addon made since then has been added too it… Sharing i caring (I don’t share my money with people who don’t care xD)
As a group, the mods decided that latest news is the best place to announce the market items. Developers have a right to be able to announce the availability of their products to the Blender community. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to click, and certainly don’t have to make snarky comments.
The market is a big new opportunity for Blender. You don’t have to like it, but people have bills to pay, and if they feel that they should be compensated for their Blender development time, that’s their prerogative. It’s selfish (and uniquely Blender-community in nature) to assume that you should get everything for free. People seem to forget that Blender development at its core is very much driven by money. Individual addon developers don’t have the luxury of a popular e-store or government grants to fund their dev time, so selling their work is their way of ensuring that their addons will be funded.
Some seem to think that if the Market didn’t exist, these addons would be available for free. On the contrary, if the opportunity didn’t exist to monetize their work, it’s unlikely that we’d ever see these addons in the first place. Nothing is stopping someone else from creating similar addons and releasing for free. In fact, this happens with commercial addons in other packages all of the time. It ensures that devs are always working to better their products. Like it or not, money is a driving factor for most people.
Now, for the addon itself. I agree that workflow and general use needs to be clarified, as well as a better example of the benefits if you want this to sell. It has a lot of potential, but the workflow looks very rough around the edges and could definitely use a lot more polish before what I’d consider v1.0. Another downside (and this isn’t at all your fault) is that the shrinkwrap modifier is so unpredictable. You also might want to consider muscles with multiple bones for bones that curve over underlying bones (i.e. pectoral muscles curving under the deltoids across the chest). I see you have sliding and sticking controls in the newer version, I’ll have to take a look again. It’s a really promising project that I’ll definitely be following closely, but there are certainly lots of things I’d desire to see added as well.
To clarify for my own part, I am attempting to give constructive criticism of the presentation of this addon. I really want a good muscle solution. People who have talked to me privately or examined any of my personal project files know how much I want this addon or one like it to succeed.
I think the market is a great tool for the community and I completely agree with Matt’s assessment that some of these addons just wouldn’t exist without it. And I don’t think anyone should be surprised that so soon after the market’s launch there have been a string of market addon releases. It’s a new opportunity, so of course people are taking advantage of it. If you don’t want to pay people for their hard work, that’s your own business. There are plenty of people who want free addons, so there are also plenty of people who will make free addons. I’m happy to pay for an addon if I feel that doing so is justified, same as any purchase. But $30…I dunno. There’s a Godzilla action figure I could buy with that, man.
To convince me (and I suspect pretty much anyone else) to buy a $30 addon, you need to convince me that it is going to give me $30 worth of a) better-looking animation results, B) overall easier and/or faster workflow, C) improved ease of some otherwise too-difficult alternative workflow, or D) some combination of the above. Or I suppose E) you need to be a good friend who tells me sincerely that buying his addon will help him not get evicted from his apartment this month.
Currently I can get pretty good muscle-like deformation from some sets of bone constraints I’ve tinkered with over the last two years. Add in a little bit of subtle soft-body jiggle and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ve seen a few demos of shrinkwrap-based muscle solutions and they all seem to suffer from at least two problems: 1) Blender’s shrinkwrap unpredictability, and 2) they are a pain to set up. From what I’ve seen this addon basically solves a little bit of problem 2, but it still looks like quite a bit of work to rig up a whole body’s worth of muscles. If this addon doesn’t reduce the work load much, the only way I would want to switch my workflow to this would be if the animation results were significantly better over what I can already coax out of a few segmented b-bones and a transformation constraint. Show me that and you have my full support and my money. Until then you have only my hopes and dreams.
Thank you very much for your add-on ! You did something that was really missing to blender.
As it was said, I think your add-on need to grow up a little bit, but I think you received some unfair comments here about selling it…
It’s your right and $30 is really not that much if it works…
Thank you very much for these nice words
I am now working on a more suitable and better visualizable version of the demo video.
I just thought that i could perhaps make a little pocket money with the add on and when the add on is completely mature for a trunk version i would be proud to provide it for disposal of course for free but i think cause i am a freelancer i could earn a little money with it
good i’ll be looking forward to the updated video. i would be happy to supprt a proper muscle rig, $30 is a lot of money so you have to convince me with your demo that your product is worth it
