Muscle Rigging and Blender Questions

Hello,

I am exploring the option of having someone create a muscle rig based on a 3-D human mesh object I would provide. I don’t have much exposure to the modelling or rigging process so would appreciate any helpful replies. I can provide clarity to my questions if they are not robust enough.

  1. How long would it take to create a muscle system robust enough to reflect common human movements such as walking, bending over, turning the torso/neck, etc.?
  2. In your experience, what is a general hourly rate Blender artists work at to complete this sort of task? Does the rate differ based on task? Animation / Rigging / etc.
  3. Is Blender the best option for muscle systems? Is Maya a good alternative?

Thanks in advance to everyone who spends the time replying.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Animation and Rigging”

There are no muscle systems in Blender but one can be emulated, to a certain extent. If you need realism, check out Maya’s muscles.

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Maya indeed is best option by default. Blender has pretty cool plugin but I am not sure how scalable it is for complex solutions.

One of the strongest result can probably be achieved with Houdini<->Blender combo. You’d create any rig you want in Blender + in Houdini define a complimentary Node graph for muscle sim to evaluate taking into account that specific rig. After you are done animating your character in Blender you can auto export(using python) your character to Houdini (fbx) where graph will be evaluated > muscle animations baked > sent back to Blender as .fbx (+pc2 point cache). You’d have very powerful workflow with fast and responsive rig on Blender side without the clutter in scenes.

Something like that can be set up for professional production but if you’re looking for easy and straightforward way then Maya.

As a side note, you most likely do not need to use sophisticated muscle systems to reflect human movement realistically. You can rig your character to reflect it in Blender already by default. You’d probably also heavily rely on shapekeys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuiB1Rv75O8 (sculpted poses no muscles)

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