Taking Modelling A Whole New Step
kyliegirl
Gorge MasterAustralia Join Date: 2002-12-11 Member: 10586Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Gorge MasterAustralia Join Date: 2002-12-11 Member: 10586Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<img src='http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/muscletk_01.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Muscle TK is the world's first commercial muscle and skinning plugin for Alias Maya 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 on Windows and Linux. Developed under the Alias Conductors program, Muscle TK gives creature TD's an alternative to traditional rigid and smooth binding techniques for their digital creatures.
Muscle TK allows artists to give their creatures realistic musculature with two different methods of attaching that musculature to the creatures' skin or 'mesh'. With Muscle TK skin, your digital creature's skin can realistically slide over muscle surfaces that are driven by underlying Maya joints.
Maintaining your creature's body-volume while undergoing deformations has traditionally been a painstaking process involving influence objects and blendshapes. Muscle TK's muscle deformer gives setup artists a quick and easy way to create fleshy body parts that squash and stretch in a realistic manner.
Muscles
Quickly draw muscles on any NURBS surface, then apply the custom muscle deformer to them. Muscle TK's muscle deformer is extremely fast, allowing you to watch a full body musculature in movement in real-time on most machines.
Soft Bodies
Any muscle surface can be made into a soft-body surface to react dynamically to the motion of the underlying joints. The 'floppiness' can be easily adjusted for maximum realism.
Dynamic Skinning
One of two skinning methods included with Muscle TK, dynamic skinning uses Maya's dynamics to cause the skin mesh to collide with the underlying muscle surfaces. Dynamic skin simulations can be cached for real-time playback in the viewport.
Muscle Skin
Muscle skin is the second skinning method included with Muscle TK. Muscle skin is a deformer that is applied on top of a skincluster node (smooth/rigid binding) to allow the muscles to affect the skin surface. With muscle skin, the setup artist is given the ability to paint the 'looseness' per vertex so that specific areas of skin can slide across the underlying muscles.
links to view this new product and see what it actually does
<a href='http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/' target='_blank'>http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/</a>
<a href='http://www.cgtoolkit.net/makingof.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.cgtoolkit.net/makingof.htm</a>
<img src='http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/pic01.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
personally i think its an awesome product for anyone who is serious on modelling and possible taking their modelling abilities further than a game <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> this might also be an awesome tool to help create realistic models of ns and create short movies <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> hint hint lol..
i reckon its worth the money anyway, might start getting into modelling O_O
Muscle TK is the world's first commercial muscle and skinning plugin for Alias Maya 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 on Windows and Linux. Developed under the Alias Conductors program, Muscle TK gives creature TD's an alternative to traditional rigid and smooth binding techniques for their digital creatures.
Muscle TK allows artists to give their creatures realistic musculature with two different methods of attaching that musculature to the creatures' skin or 'mesh'. With Muscle TK skin, your digital creature's skin can realistically slide over muscle surfaces that are driven by underlying Maya joints.
Maintaining your creature's body-volume while undergoing deformations has traditionally been a painstaking process involving influence objects and blendshapes. Muscle TK's muscle deformer gives setup artists a quick and easy way to create fleshy body parts that squash and stretch in a realistic manner.
Muscles
Quickly draw muscles on any NURBS surface, then apply the custom muscle deformer to them. Muscle TK's muscle deformer is extremely fast, allowing you to watch a full body musculature in movement in real-time on most machines.
Soft Bodies
Any muscle surface can be made into a soft-body surface to react dynamically to the motion of the underlying joints. The 'floppiness' can be easily adjusted for maximum realism.
Dynamic Skinning
One of two skinning methods included with Muscle TK, dynamic skinning uses Maya's dynamics to cause the skin mesh to collide with the underlying muscle surfaces. Dynamic skin simulations can be cached for real-time playback in the viewport.
Muscle Skin
Muscle skin is the second skinning method included with Muscle TK. Muscle skin is a deformer that is applied on top of a skincluster node (smooth/rigid binding) to allow the muscles to affect the skin surface. With muscle skin, the setup artist is given the ability to paint the 'looseness' per vertex so that specific areas of skin can slide across the underlying muscles.
links to view this new product and see what it actually does
<a href='http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/' target='_blank'>http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/</a>
<a href='http://www.cgtoolkit.net/makingof.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.cgtoolkit.net/makingof.htm</a>
<img src='http://www.cgproshop.com/product/000085/pic01.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
personally i think its an awesome product for anyone who is serious on modelling and possible taking their modelling abilities further than a game <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> this might also be an awesome tool to help create realistic models of ns and create short movies <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> hint hint lol..
i reckon its worth the money anyway, might start getting into modelling O_O
Comments
And now this for the "public" user...
Gosh time is speedy these days...
anyway,this would be something useful,for say,HDR programs.with HDR and this,along with several other modeling tools,we can pratically create models so real that they pratically could pass for human.Look at how old FF:spirits within is,add some of the more recent modeling additions,and take away some purposely add animeism from it,and you pratically have a model that could pass for human in pratically anyone's book!
and does anyone know if dynamicly deformable bump maps are possible?As in on like a chair,when you hit it with a rock and a dent is made,it stays?
Basically there is a structure of bones (ala traditional models), over which a collection of muscles get laid. The muscles typically attach at their endpoints, and maintain a constant volume through a bit of math on their cross-section (shorter = thicker). When the skeleton moves as a result of animation or IK, the muscles rearrange appropriately. In most cases it is the bones moving the muscles, rather than the other way around. I am not actually aware of any commercial tools that deal with the force being applied to a joint to control muscles.
Now, the skin is a bit of creativity. Rather than being attached to the bones, it is shrink-wrapped over the muscles, similar to simulating clothes. Imagine a fishnet made out of elastic and fitted over the layer of muscles, apply a texture (and fill in the holes) and you wind up with a basic particle system skin.
Now, if the bones get way too far out of whack, the model will look wrong. However the muscled model will probably not look worse than a traditional model (and nothing will stick out). IIRC game engines simply slap constraints on the joints during ragdoll (e.g. knee rotates on one axis, from straight to 150 degrees back). More interesting would be allowing bones to be broken or popped out of joint with enough force...
There has been a fairly significant collection of research into muscle modeling as weel as accelerated and real-time methods. A pretty good review of the basic techniques is <a href='http://ligwww.epfl.ch/~maurel/Thesis98.html' target='_blank'>here</a> (advance warning: long thesis, don't plan to read everything). There is also a lot of more recent work if you prod around in a search engine or <a href='http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/' target='_blank'>CiteSeer</a>.
My playing tends to have been in the direction of machine learning-based animation, so I may well be out of date on the game/art parts. If so I have great faith someone will let us know if so, which would actually be useful to me. For those confused by the first sentence, think halfway between artistic models and <a href='http://www.biota.org/ksims/blockies/' target='_blank'>blockies</a>. (Not getting anything useful accomplished because my real research is elsewhere -- software engineering, distributed systems).
This seems "possible" with bump mapping, but not really feasible. You could darken an area of a bump map where a "dent" should appear, but there are severe logistical problems relating to the shape, density, and material of the object. Suppose you hit an all metal chair on it's arm - it'll dent differently than if it's hit on it's back. And what if the object is made of different materials? This chair I'm sitting in now is made of leather, wood, metal, foam, and plastic. Tha's a non-trivial complication.
On top of that, the game would have to load up a copy of the bump map for each copy of the object in game. Personally, I'd rather fill up my texture memory with more detailed textures, instead of a dozen copies of a chair texture because I walked into the wrong room.
this has been around for at least a year? I don't have a good sense of time.
One of the big drawbacks to this is it only works for maya. On the plus side- makes realistic animation way way easier than with morphs. Another downside is that you can only have straight muscles... they really can't wrap around. There are other ways to do the same thing. You could model the skeleton and muscles by hand and then use muscle morphs with clothfx skin. wait... is this only nurbs? if so... :/ Cool, though. Definately effective in cases like the one with "leon." Then sculpted a maquette and used digital scanning.
^ ramblings without a point.
edit: as for what someone brought up about bump maps... normal map decal? certainly it would work on non-rotating world geometry w/ world space normal maps. Tangent space would probably work too... But really dynamic bumps and normals is impossible.
That is pretty wrong
We've had bumps for years in games
With no real time lights
edit: once again I should read the whole thread before posting...
so poor animations just stay poor animations, no matter if you got the muscular system on your model or not XD
Trust me,if the unreal 2 engine can handle that kind of stuff,I'm sure the source engine can...I'm probably thinking of a completely different kind of mesh overlay...
A bump map is not a tiny anything. It simulates bumps that affect lighting calculation.
Trust me,if the unreal 2 engine can handle that kind of stuff,I'm sure the source engine can...I'm probably thinking of a completely different kind of mesh overlay... <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Source does already impliment bump-map-deformation. Go shoot something metal, and you'll notice it.
But frosty's right source isn't that impressive.
Trust me,if the unreal 2 engine can handle that kind of stuff,I'm sure the source engine can...I'm probably thinking of a completely different kind of mesh overlay... <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Source does already impliment bump-map-deformation. Go shoot something metal, and you'll notice it.
But frosty's right source isn't that impressive. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Isn't that just a decal with shading, overlaid at a lower opacity?
Because, well, that's what it looks like, and the Source engine isn't exactly the most technically impressive engine out there.
Compare that to what FEAR is doing. You shoot a wall or the floor (Depending on the wall's material, that is) and it overlays a decal symbolising a chunk missing from the wall, as opposed to actually removing a chunk, that is, it's just a decal. But as you move around the decal, it changes, giving it the appearance that it's 3d, and it really works. Lemmie go make a video showing it.
<a href='http://creativeblank.com/media/fearholes.avi' target='_blank'>*clicky*</a>
Thing to note, my computer really sucks, so that was recorded with all settings on minimum and in the lowest res, and still recording it was choppy. But it does kinda show you the effect.
btw,FEAR isn't the first game to use decals like that,I remember an old doomish game that had decals like that.It looked more high poly then the gun XD (the gun was about 100 polys max XD)