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Muscle Rig (frankenmuscle)


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Hey People, so as the title says I am doing a rigged character with frankenmuscles. I modelled the character, muscles and skeleton in Zbrush and rigged it in Houdini for some quick tests. I have seen that many people are longing for a step by step guide on how to muscle rig a character. I want to use this opportunity to find out myself how this system like  the tissue solver works and set out a small guide how to replicate this yourself but for now it's more or less trial and error (geo moving away from rest position and stuff). If you want to contribute and help get this thread get stuffed with pro tips on this topic, i urge you to please do so. :)

Here are some screenshots of the progress so far, as i said the franken muscle is deviating from its original geo position but i'll hope to figure out fast why this happens. I'll make sure to include a basic small setup .hip file for better understanding. (at least for now with my character geo this would be to big)

 

Screenshot_26.thumb.jpg.7ea4ea97f5755f5ae68134691aba7e55.jpgScreenshot_27.jpg.19ff3eb04c58f82bbcbd285f706606e0.jpg

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Hey guys! I made some progress that i wanted to share with you. This is like a little sneak peak. There's still a whole lot of things that are bugging me and i yet have to try out the tissue solver. As I mentioned i will include a small example setup in the near future, if you are intrested :)

 

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Hey there people, so I encountered a problem with my rig. The way i understand it is that i need to turn this rig into bones. Does somebody know how to turn the rig in the clip to bones with twist effectors? The thing is the muscles are only moved by the arm and not the chest. I've tried changing the null in type properties to take in more inputs so that the muscle pin is also effected by the movement of the chest, but no luck there because the type properties are locked.

Never mind, i didn't think of the possibility of connecting the pins to the chest controller itself.

Edited by Foxhound
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Well, i have to say i somewhat had my fun with franken muscle. Tbh i feel a little burned out for now. I've tried many iterations of this setup with the tissue solver but nothing remotely working came out of it. I feel that the Houdini Muscle features could really use some love. So, i don't want back out on my word here's a small setup with some sculpted muscles. If you make any progress with this please let me know, i would really love to know how do a proper setup within houdini.

Franken_Muscle.zip

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Hi Denis,

sorry i can't help you i am not a rigger. i think you have seen the goldfarb tutorials? https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/rigging-series/

you also can ask on the houdini discord sometimes goldfarb is also online and answers questions. 

what's also nice a new release of houdini should come out soon (i think this month). the character system should get a big update but i am not sure if this or next version. (mentioned in the end of the H18 presentation) 

 

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, Mandrake0 said:

Hi Denis,

sorry i can't help you i am not a rigger. i think you have seen the goldfarb tutorials? https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/rigging-series/

you also can ask on the houdini discord sometimes goldfarb is also online and answers questions. 

what's also nice a new release of houdini should come out soon (i think this month). the character system should get a big update but i am not sure if this or next version. (mentioned in the end of the H18 presentation) 

 

 

 

 

Hey Francis, don't sweat about it. Thank you for the heads-up if some overhaul is coming i am really excited for it. I'll definitely check out if i can reach out to goldfarb. Really appreciate the input!

Edited by Foxhound
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Hi Denis,

I agree with you. I also had several topics on muscle setups here on this forum, and in the end also figured out that i need to wait for tools to mature a bit, and sideFx give some love to them.
I never felt i can have enough control (without mega complex network) with setups that include individual muscles, or i was never able to invest enough time to it. There is not much resources on this topic, where people share their workflows, so you need to figure out all by yourself, and i, personally cant invest that ammount of time right now.
I m pretty familiar with Ziva, and have done dozen of really complex characters, so i believe i have pretty good foundation. Also i am finding my way with Houdini, but i wild never consider myself advanced user. But i would expect that it should be more straight forward than as it is now.
Where i still using Houdini and find it pretty good is with more simple setups, where i don't have individual muscles but just body mesh, which i convert to FEM and i have driver inside, that drives animation.
For that i prefer Houdini better than maya / Ziva due it's procedural workflow.

But, im still lurking here, and waiting for more people to get involved and waiting for next updates to finally get my favorite DCC production viable in my workflow and projects.

I will take a look at your scene later.
Good to know there is more people interested in this topic.

Cheers,

V

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