Malcom Child - animator

What were the requirements/ considerations that you had to be wary of whilst animating for Johannes Muscle System.

Animation was actually animated before hand and then later transferred onto the muscle rig.

Is this a process that happens in the industry?

Dont quote me on this, but ibelieve that it is. Setting up control rigs (simplified versions) for the animators are used for realistic expensive systems that would prevent the user from being able to see any real time deformation.

Were there any problems with the animation, animating on a rig without any muscles?

Yes when the animation was transferred across the to the new rig items like the belly jiggle kept intersecting the surrounding geometry causing unwanted distortions to the mesh

How was this rectified?

The animation was tweak, sometimes on a frame by frame basis. However i believe that Johanees set up a system that used collision objects that stopped after a lot of testing the larger masses from intersecting.

You worked an XSI > Maya Pipeline what was the reason for this and did you have any problems.

Xsi allowed for the accomodation of animation tools that i needed and understood at the time. Whilst maya supported the generation of a more complex muscle sytem that fuffilled all the feature we needed and coding languages for the skin API.

However problems occured when transferring the animation from one package to another. We could acuratly manage to complete the animation successfully using point oven to export from XSI so I had to animate the piece in MAYA.

As Animator are there any features that you would like to see implemented that may have made the process easier?

Animating with the muscles would have been nice to add movement on top of the physics based system. We had a selectable component rig in contrast to a synoptic that we normally use in XSI that would allow us to select the parts of the character for positioning the animation. Primarily however controls for the character were built around basic sliders and hese controls.

How does it compare to other systems that you have used, have you tried cMuscle for Maya?

This is the only full system that i have used, apart from the research that i conducted for my own research project but i look foreward to using a professional system in the future, maybe Johannes will release his as a plugin one day.