Kayden Animation

Character Rigging TD, Graduate from Full Sail University

[kaydenanimation-blog]

Step 1: Design Your Rig on Paper

One of the biggest mistakes I made when starting out with CMuscle was not planning ahead and designing my rig for the final result. There are a few crucial questions one must ask before even opening the rigging workspace in Maya:

What do I want my end result to look like? Cartoony, Realistic, Fantastical, etc.?

How will this be animated? FBXs with Motion Data, or direct handmade animation?

How does this process fit into a production pipeline, and how does that affect my choices?

When you can confidently answer those questions, then you can start to design your rig. I recommend building a bones-only rig first, and then building any controls and systems separately with constraints to the main rig. This workflow accomplishes three things: you have a more realistic and easily useable bone system, you can more easily apply motion capture to the system, and integrating the animation and muscle deformation is a little more clean and easier to distinguish what is what. Also, consider having two base rigs- a proxy for animation and a bone rig. Most important is that you have a clean, simple rig to build on and a way to animate it. Any way that you can think to accomplish those two things is the right way.

For this tutorial I will creating a rig that is realistic, able to take motion capture data, and  can be animated.

[kaydenanimation-blog]

Before you Begin: Understanding CMuscle/Maya Muscle

I’ll admit that I’m of the principle of thought that there’s no better way to learn than just throwing yourself into the program with a couple guides and a whole lot of fiddling around. However, Maya Muscle requires some forethought and planning in order to get a useable end result. So this section will be just a brief overview of the vocabulary and workflow you will need to keep in mind in your pre-production.

Vocabulary:

Muscle Object- An umbrella term for bones, capsules, skin deformers, and muscles. All work together to make a functional muscle system.

Bone- This is the base for your muscle system. All of your skin deformers and muscles will be attached to the bones of your rig. They can created by converting joints or polygon objects into bone. In a simulation they are rigid and maintain their mass.

Capsule- Essentially the same as a polygon bone, but with a predetermined shape and less resource intensive than polygonal bones.

Skin Deformer- Very similar to a basic skin cluster, but with the ability to react to a muscle system.

Muscle- A nurbs shape that is connected at each end to a bone and can have deformations applied to it. Typically created in the Muscle Creator found in the Muscle Deform menu.

Cache- A simulation of your muscles with all deformations active. Requires that you have animation on your system to actually move. Works like baking out an animation, but to the geometry of your object, so your animation must be final or you will need to re-cache your system.

Workflow:

Pre-Production: Asking yourself what the end result will look like and what you will need in order to get there.

Build joints: Building a bare-bones basic rig that you can build off of and simulate easily

Build separate systems and controls (optional-ish): Building any extra systems, proxies,  or controls on a seperate rig to drive your simulation rig and to create your animation

Create bone base: Creating any necessary capsules or polygonal shapes and converting them and your joints into bone

Muscle design: Using Muscle Builder to shape your muscles and apply deformations to them

Skin deformation: Painting skin weights to react properly to muscle deformations

Caching: Tweaking and finalizing your weighting and baking with animation to the skin

Clean-up: Creating a clean file with references

[kaydenanimation-blog]

Introduction to Maya Muscle

So, you got the basics of rigging down and now you want to learn Maya Muscle. I’ll be real with you, this is a convoluted system with very little documentation since around 2011, and you will have to do a lot of problem-solving and improvisation. But I can also think of no better way to learn how to research, problem-solve, and follow through a plan than this system. I at least know I’ve learned a lot from doing it. And it will also really set you out from the crowd to understand something that very few others do.

This tutorial is as much a set of instructions as it is a list of warnings against the many issues you may encounter along the way. That being said, please let me know if you encounter any other issues not forewarned of in this tutorial so I can add them to it.