Muscle System workflows

[renisancex]

Hi All

I wanted to see if I can get some input on how I can go about approaching getting some skin sliding/muscle system effects to some characters. Here is a brief about my timeline and skill set

My base package is softimage where I am most comfortable but I am comfortable in maya as well just not as much as softimage. Rigging is not my strength however I can build a basic rigs etc. Since there is allot of ground to cover for the project I am doing i.e (animation, modeling, lighting ,rendering etc )I don't want to invest myself toooo much into allot of r&d trying to create a system and then get stuck. So as a result I am looking to see if I can integrate something already in existence to leverage time and resources.

That being said I was wondering are their muscle plugins in existence for softimage and if not for other packages like maya,max etc (maya msucle plugin) and how do you users find them. Also for example lets say I decide to go with maya muscle but want to animate in softimage. Is it possible I bake out the animation on a rig that i can then import to maya where I have a rig with the maya muscle built and do the skin simulation there ...point cache the mesh and then send it back to soft image for lighting and rendering?

[SpookyMunky]

well, there is vorlex that kosyan has been working on.. https://www.si-community.com/forum/v ... =24&t=1277

Splitting between xsi and maya I think it'd be less time consuming to just learn how to set something up . In my mind atleast, am not an expert.. from my experience can take a lot of time to get a comfortable pipeline going, but I am dumb so who knows

edit: hmm, to answer your last question, with a shadow rig in xsi that your character is weighted to, I dont see why not.. shadow rig in xsi sense being a bunch of nulls that the character is weighted to, which are linked to the actual rig.. can easily bake the animation curves to them for export along with the original mesh, ignore everything else