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Yes the genesis platform is quite unique in this aspect. In other packages it is not so easy to make a rig that adjust itself to different figure shapes during an animation session. For example a human turning into a warewolf while fighting.
On the other side daz studio has so many other limitations that overall it's not worth it for animation yet. For just a few the ik system is trivial and buggy at this time and you can't animate materials. Plus physics and fx are absolutely basic or non-existent. Also some features are locked to PAs that's not good to "common" users.
But I see they're doing a lot of work lately to improve animation features so there's hope.
Yeah, Adjust Rigging to Shape is a very neat feature
Reading the description of your technique, and looking at the videos you have posted, I get that you are using additional bones for each bulge you want to add to the character.
Did you set the rotation, translation and scale of each bulge bone for every pose of the character? For example, for arm bent 90° degrees upwards, you set the rotation (plus translation and scale) and freeze the value, is that right?
Another thing I noticed is that there is some stretching going on, maybe with this method it is not possible to implement a form of skin sliding?
Again, it would be interesting to know in what aspects is Houdini's take better, some constructive criticism is always useful
Not exactly. The figure is dynamic so those adjustements are done automatically. They can be modified after posing of course but it's not necessary. Turning off limits on joints and then posing will require some post work (very little because 90-95% of the work is already done) but you'll get more flexibility in the range of poses you can create.
Maybe I wasn't very clear in my question. What I meant was, do you fix each bulge bone rotation, location and scale as a function of the control bones, like DAZ does with JCMs? So that, for example, every time the arm is bent the arm bulge bones will animate automatically based on the control bone rotations? So you are effectively using bones in place of the JCMs? I'm asking this because it would be interesting to know how much work it would require to set up a rig like this, compared to one based on JCMs.
edit: I'm referring to JCJs
Yes, that's exactly what I'm using: JCJ's.
There was a ton of trial and error work put into it however thanks to the "Adjust Rigging to Shape" tool it only takes 1 minute to transfer all that work to another chararacter.
Very ingenious! Especially considering that this way is way faster to tweak the deformations and it should be easier to simulate the muscle dynamics.
Technically it should be possible to simulate skin sliding over muscles with the same technique, unless DAZ has a sort of shrinkwrap modifier?
Daz has a Smoothing Modifier which does something similar. Its main use is to fix poke-throughs on tight clothing. It's unusable as a skin deformer for underlying muscles but it has the same algorithm.
My issue with skinwrap modifiers and simulated muscles is that I didn't find one single example that's similar to what I had in mind. All examples are of monsters, animals, or cartooony people. I just wanted to see it used on an aesthetically pleasing human base mesh. Each time those techniques were used to create humans the end result always looked off. The muscle rig by itself looked great but when skin was placed on top it just looked weird. My rig still has some weird deformations however because everything is in real-time I can also edit it quickly in real-time without having the constantly redo the simulation.
Yeah, I agree that simulation approaches are still a no-go as far as iteration is concerned
Wow... this has been a fascinating read! Hats off to you Faux... what you are doing is absolutely incredible. I am sure that there are a bunch like me that are waiting for you to get to the "shut up and take my money" stage!
Cheers!