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

- Simon Yuen: Senior Character TD, Sony Pictures Imageworks

for faster and easier deformation cMuscle is an affordable plugin developed by Michael Comet, a creature TD supervisor at DNA in Dallas, TX working under Comet Digital. It can easily be installed as a plugin for maya, the downside that it has no xsi equivilent at this point in time and no cross platform support. Hower It has proven its worth in the industry and has been used in recent films such as Spiderwick Chronicles (see case Study)

There is alot of help out there i.e digital tutors video series, for the plugin and comes packed with excellent documentation and a great visual tool shelf to make ergonomiacally attractive.

The work flow is straightforeward and follows principles similar to those of standard rigging methods.

The process carries through to a high level of sophistication and asking professionals on the forums would suffice for most industry needs and all those for home.

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.

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 option to use of all methods. As an ultimate package it contains almost all the other feature disussed here with the exeption of corrective shapes that can be implemented seperatly ontop of the system.