faux muscle setups for a character animated in maya?

[anthonymcgrath]

hey guys this is more of a general question so feel free to throw your comments in...
 

so i have a character i've animated in maya - i wanted to get this into houdini and try and do some subtle muscle jiggle and muscle bulge/tensing on the animated mesh.


so my initial thoughts were - export out the alembic then try and run it through f.e.m system - doesn't really bring much except jiggle & looseness - a little similar to a grains setup (there is a h15 masterclass on yt where a guy does something similar with piggyhead)


so after that my thoughts are now leaning to this:
1 export out the basepose character/skel as fbx from maya

2 export out the anim as fbx

3 in hou - fasten muscles to those joints, paint in some weights and things to provide the muscle bulge/defo in the right areas - mainly pecs and arms for my test

4 attach the anim to the fbx character skel i've imported and fastened the muscles to

5 sim

6 export alembic out back to maya

 

this is my total noobness approach and thought process - its probably massively overconvoluted but i would love to get some feedback on how this is done in feature films - i know there's a ton of propietary tricks and tech but any advice for a homebrew maya-->hou-->maya pipeline would be ace.  Also any tricks instead of muscles - do chops do a good job or is there other tricks i can use?