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Skinning a Whole Human Body Using Maya Muscle

The goal of this exercise is to test the Maya Muscle tool. Here you can see a before/after image showing the muscles at work, including skin deformations and additional Visual Effects (nHair and nCloth):

The solution I'm developing consists of:

Attaching the muscles to joints
Modeling additional virtual bones using polygons
Using virtual bones as deformers, attaching, moving, and sliding my character's skin over them
Importing blendShapes from ZBrush, adding them to the head joint for expressions, and
solving the facial expressions via skinning instead of making an additional rig system.

Attaching muscles to joints

This is a basic example of the Muscle tool attaching to an arbitrary joint:

As you can see, the muscle attaches in 2 places, adding locators, creating a NURBS Surface, and simulating them as they squash and stretch, following the anchors on the rotating joints.

Influence objects

This are the polygonal models I'm using for the clavicles as influence objects:

Here are some visuals from the 3 main muscle systems, namely, shoulders/Neck, arms, and legs:

Skinning poses using Maya Muscle — Solving deformations in 3 anatomic regions using Maya Muscle.

I'm adding an attribute to her breast, animating her breathing using a model of her ribs as influence object:

Breathing deforming breast with rigged influence object — Deforming her breast like breathing, using an influence object.

And another influence in the back of her shoulder to deform the skin when she moves her scapula:

Scapula influence object — Using an influence object to mimic deformation from her scapula.

BlendShapes

These are some of the blendShapes I'm importing from ZBrush to deform her face and add facial expressions. Note that the only joints in her face are the ones controlling jaw and eyes:

Comparison facial expressions — Comparison between facial expressions from ZBrush and composited version from Maya/Nuke.

And finally, this is what one part of the Shape Editor looks like for this character:

BlendShape editor — Key animating, using the blendShape editor to link sculpted deformations and rig controls.

If you want to find out more about skinning, rigging and deformation workflows, click on these case studies:

Rigging Human Body

Rigging a human body using animator friendly rigging in Maya. Torso, spine, FK/IK, neck, head, pose, fixed elbow, hand, reverse foot, independent pivots.