Hello, I feel extremely proud to introduce X-Muscle System, a Tissue Designer and Simulator add-on for Blender. It will debut on blendermarket.com any day soon.
X - MUSCLE SYSTEM
X-Muscle System is designed for rapid muscular system, tissue and other organic and non-organic object creation and their physical simulations. Its main purpose is to help visualize better skin surface deformations according to volume preservation of the body muscles, fat and even skeletal bones. Add-on lets you focus on the design, creativity and to significantly speed up the workflow with extremal learning curve.
With X-Muscle System an artist is free to focus on the artwork and use effectively his time to create even more realistic, complex shapes and animations of characters and creatures. With its simplicity and integration with Blender’s native tools, X-Muscle System is powerful, easy in use and ready to start straightaway. X-Muscle System has been designed and written from the scratch and completed with the functionality you always wanted.
Main system functions are:
animatable muscle parameters like size, properties settings and controllers
supports muscle Shape Keys as well as for muscles as for model mesh
body auto-weight painting function for muscles and controllers with scope control
auto-attach to bones “Auto-Aim” mode
flexor and extensor muscle type changing with one, single click
micro skin controllers
allows easy muscle mirroring by single click with intelligent X-Mirror feature
vast support for variety types of armatures and custom rigs including Rigify
simple but powerful control over the parameters and settings
tissue object management with advanced naming and renaming
material management
display tools
These are only few features system provides. Documentation for full specification.
Looks interesting but why so ugly presentation when it comes to render? I want to see this stuff in action not in viewport. Sure it looks poromising, muscles bend like they suppose to, but does it influence animation? In the end you showed walking ogre for just a few seconds, waving his club in front of the camera, just as if you tried to hide the final result (which is probably hard to notice).
It looks great, but…
to sell such a thing, you first need real results. Real good looking animation. I fully understand that if you are a coder, it doesn’t have to be in your powers to do great realistic animation. Connect with some artist who is good with anatomy and animation, do a great video together, and then your system becomes not only successfull, but also usefull.
There is also this addon:
I’ve never seen a good animation made in blender and including muscles. But it doesn’t mean I don’t hope this will happen anytime in the future…
It’s true that a presentation don’t look convincing, but in fact Your developed muscle system looks very promising. That’s probably because of shading issues, it’s quite hard to see how exactly look mesh deformed by muscle. A little bit of spectularity should do the job
Can You post the link to a full documentation?
Really nice looking work and great to see this. The flexor and extensor demo looks particularly good. And there is a soft body setting as well ? It would be interesting to know how the settings for the soft body are controlled and set. The ideal would be if you could wire them up to one universal slider or at least a very few sliders. The soft body effect would need to be easily re set depending on the speed of an animation. Often the setting would need to be animated if there was a change in speed during the scene.
Also how does this work with library linked in rigs ? Would you have access to customise the settings in different linked in scenes ? That would be a very important and vital feature for most Blender animation pipelines I think.
Anyway, If this is as fast and usable as the video is implying then this looks really promising.
The main problem with most off the self muscle sims is just the complications and speed of working with them. It often makes them impractical for many time budgeted project pipeline situations where a muscle and secondary effect might be desired. So normally other more predictable and manageable methods need to be used.
I have to agree a bit with some of the points above about the video. While good at sketching out the workflow and possible ease of use. It’s very hard to see the effects clearly that the sim brings to an animation. How is it more advantageous to using joint driver driven shape keys and other alternate methods ?
It would be good and really helpful to show the sim working in a fully rendered animation. At least a couple of very clear walk cycles and sharp renders in a turn table so the effects and advantages can more obviously be seen. The ogres club popping up in foreground in the animation at the end makes it very hard to see what is happening with the body motion clearly. It is a bit like witnessing missing black frames and creates a sort of stuttering effect. And the final animation is very brief. But it would also be more clear to see as a full render too.
Toka
All features you’re asking are available and much more. Video covers just some the features you get. It’s all described in documentation.
You enable Softbody physics with single click.
Advantages? There are many. This method is extremely fast and you see results straightaway. It saves you a lot of time and it’s also great for prototyping. Shape Keys have limitations and this is why this add-on has been made. This method is non-destructive to the model and can be easily reversed. It is dedicated for users that are convinced to Shrinkwrap technique and it’s improved by very adjustable microController, that solves known Shrinkwrap issues. It may be complementary to other techniques like displacement stress map, Shape Keys and others. Keep in mind every tool require practice skills, even these easy to learn may by hard to master.
pildanovak yes, shame on me. I am a coder but also an artists. All models, texturing, animations and music are my creation. Can we call this video a Teaser? Official Demo Video will change shortly. With all cool stuff.
Thank you guys for fast feedback. This is just as you said brief tool presentation, its main features and workflow.
I agree with Mookie3D, it was really difficult to see the muscle physics in the final ogre walk cycle. Maybe do a dedicated demo of it so it is more noticeable. The system looks good though. I think the only thing that would be nice to see is maybe more accurate muscle shapes as a default eg. create the triceps instead of just a blob. It would probably make manipulating them a bit easier.
I love how this looks, but I still think that all muscle systems in Blender will have a hard time taking off as long as our shrink-wrap tools are as lackluster as they are. I’ll definitely still be checking this out though.
just a suggestion, but maybe you should look for an Artist/Animator here that would be willing to work on a presentation for a free license/copy of this. Good trade, I think. Plus you could get some really valuable feedback.
Shape Keying looks more like morphing than muscle sliding under the skin… driver pattern can be complicated and generally setup takes some time and if you mess up cleaning up meshes can be time consuming. However being said these techniques can be even combined together.
With X-Muscle System you do this in … I don’t know… 15 seconds? With much better result and real-time jiggle animation free. So?
Words are needless. I think add-on with demo reel will defend itself. Just please wait for it
karab44:
my apologies I didn’t mean to be harsh or fast judging, I just commented on the Teaser, while I thought it’s the final result. Looking forward to the follow up.
I fully understand your reaction and honestly I am nit happy with this video neither. Just wait for some amazing works showing the real life use cases. I didn’t wanted to make another booby presentation and really care what people say. Skin works really nice on ogre walk cycle but it’s subtle effect and I think video quality killed it. I didn’t wanted to overexpress the effect. Really wanted to keep that natural
Yes, it is one of most important features available. You click to enable and have 4 tune parameters to create muscles, fat or even bones. For the last one you simply use custom shape to model for example rigs and disable jiggling. It will work like rigs under the skin.
stylized shapes features of course are available, they have also default stylish Shape Keys enabled.
I didn’t mean to be harsh or fast judging, I just commented on the Teaser, while I thought it’s the final result. Looking forward to the follow up.