...by far the most complete and powerful off the shelf muscle / skin system available today."

- Simon Yuen: Senior Character TD, Sony Pictures Imageworks

cMuscle is an affordable plugin developed by Michael Comet for Maya, creature TD at DNA. It can easily be installed as a plugin for maya using the standerd process, it currently has no xsi equivilent at this point in time and provides no cross platform support.

The work with the package seems a little dauning at first with a huge menu bar and shelf added, however the work flow is straightforeward, following principles similar to those of standard rigging methods found in Maya.

Support is porvided in the form of extensive doucmentation part of the default installation, and also by third parties which includes a digital tutors video series, for the plugin and comes packed with excellent documentation and a great visual tool shelf to make ergonomiacally attractive.

Its features are able to take systems to a high level of sophistication.

With features such as skin sliding, real time deformation, fat, jiggle. It produces very realistic results that provide interactive realtime view as long as meshes are light and features such as skin sliding are kept low in detail. From this point render/ viewport interaction decellerations exponential to the features added.

cMuscle has gained respect in the industry beeing used in recent films such as Spiderwick Chronicles (see case Study)

Bugs are still apparent in the workflow as its still in early versions. Extra plugins are written around this for industry stability. Cheap work arounds are used to get around problems.

I think that if using maya it is the most attractive muscle system on the market as it is able to cater to high level demands that in the past only propriatory tools have been able to offer.

Providing faster and easier deformations, as a package it combines almost all other features tested on this site, with the exeption of shapes that can be implemented seperatly ontop of the system, fufilling all the catagories to a high standerd.