Hello everyone!
Here’s the latest dog rig demo!
Best Regards!
Albert
And that’s it for today!
I will add more extra skeletons after sales reach 300:
- elephant
- rhinoceros
- gorilla
- hippo
Now let’s go back to coding!
Best regards!
Albert
I think if you’d make a demo as such, it would really highlight the capability of the product:
I know there’s no FEM sim, still interested to see how much can be done.
Agreed.
I’m a silent observer for quite a while now, and I’m really impressed by the effort you’re taking here.
From a character design/rigging/animation perspective however I’m not so much interested in skeleton models. Don’t take me wrong, they’re looking great and I’m sure they’re very helpful to anyone seeking good reference for accurate and naturalistic character modeling - but to me, that’s not the crucial point when it comes to muscle simulation. This is all about believable and dynamic skin deformation you can’t achieve using bones, shapekeys and all the other “traditional” rigging tools.
In most cases (except when modeling the Night King’s army …) I take it that level of detail for something never be shown in the final animation will even be a tremendous waste of resources …?
Please consider this “complaint” as pure egoism. I’ll buy at once IF I see it can do what I hope it can do. So far this thread is a sustained feed for my doubts as you’re providing news & promo images in a high frequency, but are still hiding the real thing. You’ve allowed for some promising glimpses like the pectoralis and forearm demo (the latter also showing some potential weaknesses like the skin “sucked in” between extensor and flexor muscles), and the running velociraptor, where skin texture hides most of the details, but didn’t provide enough to remedy those doubts.
Again, please don’t take me wrong. I’d just love to see a more detailed skinned character demo featuring an unobstructed view of skin deformation quality.
And anyway: kudos for your effort! 
If you give me 10 thousand likes for this video. I’ll give you what you want.
Best Regards!
Albert
For starters You got mine! :yes:
[QUOTE=Helmut S.;3247667]Agreed.
From a character design/rigging/animation perspective however I’m not so much interested in skeleton models. Don’t take me wrong, they’re looking great and I’m sure they’re very helpful to anyone seeking good reference for accurate and naturalistic character modeling - but to me, that’s not the crucial point when it comes to muscle simulation. This is all about believable and dynamic skin deformation you can’t achieve using bones, shapekeys and all the other “traditional” rigging tools.
In most cases (except when modeling the Night King’s army …) I take it that level of detail for something never be shown in the final animation will even be a tremendous waste of resources …?
Hi Helmut
It’s actually very standard practice these days to begin rigging a (… realistic … ) character or creature rig by starting with an accurate skeleton mesh. This doesn’t always necessarily need to be a super hi res mesh. I’ve often had to build up and model simplified low poly, but still very accurate skeletal models when a stock hi res is not easily available.
Far from being wasted work hidden under the surface. This is most often an invaluable rigging aid. Firstly it can remove a huge amount of guess work and fumbling about in trying to work out the correct joint placement.
It is also hugely beneficial to have an accurately jointed skeletal guide and reference moving and flexing in the right way under the skin mesh for the other parts of the process. Be it simply painting straight forward skin weights. Or later adding a muscle sim, either blend shapes or under skin, object, deformer driven as with the system being demonstrated here. Having the skeleton mesh under the skin as a guide can give a lot of clarity and just save so much time in the long run. Even though the work is seemingly mostly hidden away in the final render.
It is also a good reference point during the animation process, to be able to check the poses and movement against a skeletal form. Especially for creature work.
The outer shape of most animals can be very deceptive as to how the skeletal form is actually working under the surface. A horse or deer would be a classic example. Especially the way the neck vertebrae are arranged and jointed, and the joints of the back knee and thigh. The low swing of the neck joints and the angled and crouched static, or rest position of the back legs and hips are almost impossible to see and understand clearly in the fully fleshed out animal. But to get the limbs and body to deform correctly ( … even just from a simple weighted skin with no muscle sim at all … ) It’s so important to get this part right.
Anyway all the best.
Yeah last shots I animated had two “realistic” bears and the rigger had a fully modeled skeleton for reference (https://vimeo.com/239503688). I think it’s really important.
@Toka, Hadriscus:
You misunderstood my remark, I’m fully aware of that. It wasn’t about the value of accurate reference, waste of work or rigging with respect to real, working biomechanics (“tremendous waste of resouces” was geared towards compute, not human work effort resources, if, for instance, that kind of skeleton model was used as a shrinkwrap target to model skin slide over bones).
If any, it was about karab’s promo strategy for X-muscle system.
I’d just like to see more of X-muscle system in action, and less about all the other stuff in the package. Blender’s shrinkwrap modifier is around for quite a while, but so far success to build convincing muscle rigs around shrinkwrap seems to have been rather limited - I’d just like to know what kind of inprovement one will see with X-muscle system. As long as I don’t understand what I can expect from it as a buyer & user, I’m not so much interested in bonuses, and to be honest, putting emphasis on bonus material instead of core features keeps me from buying.
Hi,
Experimented with cloth based Sim not that long ago which possibly could allow more advanced skin simulation like one presented the lion with wrinkles. However this alternative solution would so far require caching. I am doing the research to combine this with actual technique used in addon and reduce the compute time. The good side is the baked animation is usually pretty fast in playback.
BR!
A.
I looked fairly deeply into Maya Ncloth solutions a short while back for a recent VFX project. It does indeed require caching. A lot of it. It also did seem to be incredibly hard and time consuming to get a result that looks quite right, and you are always at the mercy of the sim to a very large extent.
I guess because of this. Most of the simulations I’ve seen like this in Maya seemed to always require quite a lot of polish and overworking to look right. Most often by caching out alembic file passes and working on top of those with extra sculpting, jiggle nodes and blend shapes. Often upping the mesh resolution as well in the caching process, in order to work in the extra skin movement details. Creases etc…
In the end it just wasn’t practical for us, time budget or staff wise and we used other methods.
The lion looks hugely impressive. But I suspect it required a lot of polish and finessing. The creases around the shoulders and hips look a lot like either blend shapes or an animated displacement map ?
From my recent experience of this at least. The main advantages in using a cloth sim approach seems to be in creating the skin sliding over muscle and bone effect. Fine creases and other folding and stretching effects often involve animated blend shapes or displacement or normal maps. From what I’ve seen at least, its still very hard to have enough control of that in a typical cloth sim with tension maps to get a convincing enough result. So a cloth skin solution on it’s own is normally not really enough.
I’m not sure there are many, or any, off the shelf muscle skin solutions using a cloth sim based approach ? As opposed to skin and deformer based. I could be wrong. There is just so much to try and keep up with in this industry. How off the shelf would this lion sim seem to be ? It seems they have a technical team and are providing a rigging and consultancy service rather than an off the shelf plugin product ?
I still feel a fast reasonably effective traditional deformer driven solution is the way to go in aiming for a popular and useful Blender add-on. Something that is straight forward to work with for an average rigger animator, artist. And most importantly works fast and uses the minimal resources and simulation time possible. And leaving open the possibility to augment and enhance it using other methods Such as blend shapes ( Shape keys ) and bump maps. There is so much of a wide user base potential I think with that approach. So I think x Muscle is probably taking a wise approach so far.
The sort of results and approaches shown in some of the Weta and Zivi demos etc posted here require a huge amount of time and resources and individual talent’s to create. There is no magic button or software plugin yet for something like that. And it’s always going to be the raw artistry that sells the final illusion each time.
Fantastic work !
OK Guys! Let’s do this!
Best Regards!
Albert
Hey everyone! Great news!
It’s been a year since the X-Muscle System add-on has been released. Time flies so fast! On this occasion there’s a special offer for this week only on BlenderMarket https://blendermarket.com/products/x-muscle-system
Best Regards!
Albert
Hello everyone,
Short demonstration on how to use X-Muscle System with ManuelBastioni Lab, the free and open source character editor for Blender.
ManuelBastioni Lab 1.6.1
http://www.manuelbastioni.com/
X-Muscle System 1.9.7
Best Regards!
Albert
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Great job. What software did you use?
Looks promising, I agree with the comments that you need a demo artistically and technically appealing
Hey guys! It’s another Blender Market Sale! It’s the best time to get the add-on before new X-Muscle System 2.8 for Blender 2.8 release. All upgrades to the add-on are lifetime free.
Best Regards!
Albert
1 Like