A couple of questions about Maya Muscle

Rigging
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Hello guys :slight_smile:

I’ve finally attempted to dive into Maya Muscle, which seems to be pretty awesome. I’m able to the basic things when working on things separately. However, when I’m trying to do muscles on a complete rig I run into some questions and problems.

First off, I’m wondering what the point of capsules is? Is it necessary to convert all of my original joints to capsules?

Secondth, I tried to convert my original skinCluster to a cMuscleSystem, which then converted all of my original joints to capsules and converted my original weights to stickyWeights. This worked fine, but when adjusting the stickyWeights on the left side and trying to mirror, I’m getting some weird behaviour.
In some cases, some of the vertexes won’t get any weights, and will just stay in it’s original position when moving around on the joints. In other cases, the vertexes will offset, I’ve attached an image of this:
Link to image

Another thing, I’ve searched around to see if I could find some comprehensive documentation/tutorials on Maya Muscle without much luck. I would really like to know more about what I need to think about when using Muscles.

My last question, I found a video (which I think is from Autodesk) where he explains a bit around using Collisions. It looks like this is just a video in a series of others, if that’s the case, does anyone know where I can get my hands on these videos?
Here’s the link for the video: Link

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Capsules are just sorta like joints that can interact with the muscle system, since thickness is something that might matter for a bone which regular joints don’t have, and you may want ways to define how much the muscle sticks or slides on the bone.

Did you start the weights on the characters left side or the view left side when looking at the character? I always find for some reason working on the characters left side and going to it’s right always works better than the other way around in Maya. Don’t know why. If not that, it could maybe be your tolerance in the mirror settings? Try setting it higher. Sometimes if things aren’t perfectly symmetric, it can break things. Often I find it’s the IK system I build that does it. An ik arm may not go back to 0,0,0 rotations after you reset the control rather than undo the movement, which gets you slightly a-symmetrical positions now which can screw up your mirroring. Other times, computers just hate you and are plotting to take over the world and you just have to fix it by hand. In cases where the later happens I usually find if I rebuild the skeleton from scratch, it works again. Sucks, I know.

I think digital tutors had some good videos you can buy. I haven’t seen anything for free, but if you need to learn some muscle systems, the videos are worth it.

Don’t know anything about the other video you mentioned, sorry.

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