Hulkey Muscle Rig WIP 1

Done with the back muscles. Still some smoothing to be done, but just want to put these 2 side by side, with & without muscles to see the effects.

Hulkey Muscle Flex Test

Decided to play around with Hulkey again. Always wanted to play around with muscles more so decided to put some into him to see how much more can I push the deformations.

Built the skeletal structure using NURBS spheres. Similar to the one in Autodesk Hyper-Realistic series. Played around with rigging up the scapulas, and pretty happy with the results. Managed to achieve a little "sliding around the rib-cage" effect. I will put up a video on that later.

Muscles built using a simple muscle plugin with 4 attachment points and volume preservation.

This is the test to make sure no muscles flip during motion, before I even start skinning them:

Next up, the skin deformation itself.

Nice Hulkey Pose!

Really love this pose by Edward. AWESOME!

Also revealed some deformations to be fixed when I looked at the scene. :P

Hulkey Walk Cycle Test

A test by my animator friend. Thanks Barry!

Hulkey's all done!

Of course, still pending feedback and comments from my animator friends. Probably some bug requests as well haha.

Added various deformations using the poseDeformer plugin, still my trusted tool with regards to shape fixes. Shapes are sculpted mostly, but I did setup a separate rig with Maya Muscle skin system to provide the base of deformations. Took a short time to setup, but got really good results with it. Using that, shapes are duplicated off the geometry, and used as target shapes in the poseDeformer nodes. Simple and easy, yet the results are great and the rig still remained fast enough for Animation.

I'll probably compile a whole list of Hulkey's features as well as demos, but for now, I'll just leave you with a fun pose of him. :)

Hulkey Facial Rig Done!

Finally done with the facial blendshapes, hooking up to the facial GUI, and added the on-face controls for additional animation tweaks. Rig's getting slower though. Will spend some time to optimize it further, IF I have that time haha...

Next up, deformation tweaks for the body. GRRRRR!

Hulkey Anim Rig Done!

Completed all I wanted to do with Hulkey's animation rig. Ability to do no-pop IK FK switching and dynamic parenting is now implemented as a right-click pop-up menu instead of a separate character UI like I did for the beast.

I will be doing some feature demos later, but for now, here's the basic skinning deformation tests for Hulkey. You can click on youtube directly to see a higher res version. I believe the key to good deformations always start with good basic skinning before you can add on any other deformation features.