Here is a tool that I started working on on the side. This is not a muscle simulation add-on rather it is a tool to draw, shape and organize muscles. I have a long list of things to do but this is my early wip progress with it.
The idea is that you can draw and shape your muscles with it. Once done, you can either use it for sculpting or for your muscle simulations later. I am just seeing if there is any interest for the add-on for real. I will still develop it for myself since I like to make such underlying forms for my sculpts and models, however I probably will end up making it a commecial add-on. As you guess it takes a lot of time to make it ready for real use.
The image below is not a muscle study, it is one of the tests I made with the add-on.
Looks good mate. Keep updating the thread with your progress. The idea of having a visualisation of underlining muscle groups will aid in a sculpt over afterwards.
I did not know about the curves in 3dcoat, I will take a look at them. Trying to model them with curves manually is still a better method than manually shaping polygons, but I would like to make it even faster and hopefully keep it procedural somewhat so that these can be animated or rigged or used for other purposes later.
Individual muscle strips or shapes are generally simple shapes but layering them and somewhat interacting with an underlying construction or generalized shape is the part that takes time.
Zsketch in Zbrush is also good but it is easy to loose the integrity of the shapes easily with it, although it is probably one of the nicest and artistic ways to get some muscle looks.
I am glad you like it. I will try to post a video that demonstrates the basic idea later tonight.
I think that a muscle tool will be a tremendously helpful tool for modeling, animation, simulation and for concept art. Blender provides us plenty of space to tinker with such idea.
Ok here is the first video demo. Please bear in mind that it is verl early in the development and most of the functionality is missing. This is to show and demostrate the initial idea. Basically one will be able to control multiple aspects of a muscle strip interactively during laying it on the surface. I will also introduce different muscle types and groups (like split headed ones or large flat muscles etc) but that is far down from now.
Obviuosly I am sure most people will wonder if there will be self interacting and collisions between the muscles, well, not for the initial release, because that is quite a complex situation computationally so I will go around those issues with smart solutions.
I actually prototyped the basic functionalities but it needs more work to make it a finished product. I will get back to it once I unload current projects that I am on.
