This is one of the demo videos from the Maya muscle smart collision test, which I  have been doing for the past few days.My initial plan was to start of with the skinning using Maya joints itself and convert it to Maya muscle system.But later I changed my mind and decided to go with rigorous testing of all the options provided by the Maya muscle menu set.Even though I had a glimpse at the options during the release of maya 2008 extension 2 itself, this was the first time I got to explore the skin weight options provided by Autodesk. Believe me, Autodesk has packed a lot of options keeping in mind the immediate need of a character setup artist that you will never want to go back again.

This one is the image of the muscle setup I used for testing the deformations.I didn’t spend much time on sculpting the muscle shapes.The target was to simplify various muscle groups in to one which would provide me enough options to test out the deformations.

Of course there were some bugs here and there which I found quite irritating, I was fortunate enough to find some solutions to them.

1.Maya was retaining the selection of the first muscle objects created showing some garbage values in the channel box.Unless you undo the first muscle and start it all over again, Maya wont show any signs of defeat.

2.Maya would end up in a fatal error if you ever happen to scrub the time line once the muscles have been bound to the mesh.This can of course be fixed by caching the geometry, But users like me who got accustomed to  skinning the models by setting keys on the joints, are left with no choice other that creating floating GUI to control the joint rotation without deselecting the geometry.

Overall the collision feedback is fairly good with lot of skinning options  to control each invidual portion of the geometry.