Does anybody know whether or not it would be possible to create a realistic muscle system and use it to define a creature’s skin, like Aslan, or the dinosaurs from JPIII? If so, how would one go about it? 
This question has puzzled me for some time now.
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Yes in a word . You can purchase rigged meshes with muscles on CG society’s web site - though I don’t know how good they are (not willing to spend $$$ for something you can do in Blender 
).
I’m working on just that right now .
Instead of the “my first body mesh” route a lot of people seem to take I wanted a posable mesh with proper anatomical detail and working muscles . One of my main complaints about the “mesh first” (seems like its the standard work-flow in CG animation) is that no matter how “accurate” you make the mesh when it comes time to pose or animate it using the armature you wind up doing a lot of tweaking ala weight painting or shape keys (or so it seems to me from the tutorials I’ve found and some threads here also) - which seems to me very counter-intutitive (I have a background in sculpture and when you make things in the real world you start with the “armature” first ) .
So for the past few months I have been trying to learn as much about the armature system in Blender and have built a few rigs (not quite happy with them yet) simulating the skeletal system . Recently I have been adding “stretch-to” bones on top of the “bones” of the skeleton to simulate the muscles, adding test meshes to try out the deformations . And they’re working well so far … But I discovered that for accurate placements of the muscles require and somewhat accurate representations of (mesh) bones and right now I am modeling them … I’m hoping that when I am done most of the surface of the resulting mesh will be controlled by “stretch-to” bones which will define the muscles which will be named vertex groups (not all because there are some parts of the body where the skeletal system defines the shape like the illac crest for example) . I’m thinking that a mesh produced this way will require almost no tweaking for decent poses or animations and no lost vertices and can even lead to low poly versions for game development with simple quads standing in for muscles and other anatomical landmarks (but the armature rig will be more complex then the mesh!) with the relationship/movement being pretty “realistic” seeing how the underlying structure simulates the human anatomy … Well that’s how I’m going about at this in Blender (because the stretch-to contraint in Blender has volumetric properties to it) but in the past I think I remember people used meta-balls to simulate muscles as well(I think this was before catmill-clark sub divisioning was used as extensively as it is now) … But basically the process is to set up a real bone/muscle relationship in CG space … I think I’m going to wind up with several hundred bones/vertex groups to get a decent result :eek:
… Hopefully I’ll have something to post in a few months but right now’s a very busy and stressful time for me at my day job …
Below is a screenshot of the armature I’ve been working on .The bright green bones have the stretch-to constraint applied . And also a skull I made a while ago (though the blend file I now have doesn’t have teeth - I was doing shots of tequila while making it and forgot to save 
)
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Sounds amazing! Don’t forget to post an update when you get time to do more work on it.
Cheers
Pablo