Quadruped Autorig - Ankle Muscles

[ofer]

Hello. I have a simple question on the quadruped autorig.

First, when using muscles, there are small muscles in the area of every leg-joint. Don't know if thats always the case, but in my rig they are all orange. They several names

like - add_color_ankle_joint and similiar. Should I paint these muscles weights on the joint, or is it for "internal use". I ask because I tries both ways, and I didn't get a very good result yet.

Second, I see that in H9, there is an option between muscles and bones. Why would I prefer to use bones?

Thanks!

PS. I just remembered that I forgot to look for this specific issue in the helldog tutorial. Anyway, if someone has a good advice, Ill be glad to have it.

[graham]

All the joints have those small, single metaball muscles and they are supposed to be orange. While all the standard muscles are controlled by the standard anchor points, these joint muscles are setup to properly blend between the joints they are in between. When flexing the arm for example, the elbow ball will be blended halfway between the upper arm and forearm. Unfortunately they do end up showing up with those names. Since the capture setup requires the sop name if the metaball object it will report the name of the display sop, which in all the joints is a primitive sop for adding the color. While probably putting a null at the end of each joint probably would have been the idea setup, there is nothing problematic with the way it is now. In summary, yes you can/should be able to weight to those balls for the best results.

In Houdini 9.1 we added the option to choose between bones and muscles. This option provides you with the choice of your deform type as well as access to the larger array of capture editing tools that are available for bone deforms only.

[ofer]

OK thanks. I think I just need to practice a lot, and get to know each muscle and its influence.