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I’m sorry to say but that looks like crap
I’m not too fond of this video, either.
But do check out this other one, though, – https://vimeo.com/403567152
I never will understand the why some random people feel big pleasure to be rude to others.
And about the MCG: this is a excelent new solution for max! Thank you Alaa Alnahlawi and Scytales!
I completely agree, first there is no need to be jerks, second if you’ve managed a CGI company, you’ll know not everything in the industry has a huge budget, this is a very creative solution that can fit many scenarios.
Lastly, it does not look like crap, it doesn’t look like lion king but I don’t think the idea was to achieve the same result as a FEM simulation, just an approximation.
Guest above is not me, but while I agree this is not a good result I would never try to deliberately be demeaning to artist who attempted with the current non-existing tools in max to create something that would pass as muscle illusion.
As for the second video, it is a better attempt, unfortunately I can’t imagine the amount of modifier layers and dirty setups one has to do to achieve half decent results.
With that said, I still take the pleasure to not only demean Autodesk but to go on with my crusade regarding their arrogance and ignorance on these matters.
I’m sure someone is going to show up and tell me Bifrost is going to take care of all my problems for me just you wait and see, to whom I would say kindly with sugar on top to ……
The thing about sharing techniques is that its completely open for adaptability and improvement and no one can know for what job it might come in handy. It’s unfortunately you guys are annoyed with this news to the point you are posting insulting messages. I hope you got something out of it, cause I think no one else did.
As for the technique shared: its a creative use of some of 3ds max features and maybe the current end result is not very impressive, it can definitely improve and I would hope people will look into it more to see what can be achieved with it.
Good job.
As Juang said, I am not the one with any insulting posts, as for the insults from the other guest, sure it may be misplaced I assume its out of anger that we don’t have any proper solutions in max and we have to come up with hacks (which this is with all honesty) to try and try hard to make it just passable should a production require it.
Search on youtube: Paul Neale flex Muscle. Very good solutions.
Hey! Brake a bit guys! 🙂
There is only one person (that BTW is trying to impersonate another person, the originl GUEST) that said something insulting.
I think it’s a pretty cool technique, sure it’s not as advanced as other options or plugins, but it is perfectly valie in many situations, also the workflow is usable not just in max but in other pacakges.
I think sharing this kind of techniques is awesome, thanks Scytales!
the second video looks pretty cool
I’m sorry if I sounded too harsh earlier, I do appreciate the efforts done and the techniques shared, I just think the quality shown on that particular example leaves a lot to be desired, but I do appreciate him sharing the technique.
Great job, well done! I want to ask a question, what can you plan to make a tutorial so from scratch how to create animation with muscles without plug-ins?
Nice work! It seems like a decent solution that would work well in many cases. I assume it uses soft bodies through the Flex modifier? Last time I played around with Flex, it had severe issues with fast moving rigs, and was unable to contain the muscle realistically. If my character was running, the muscles would stretch a meter behind him! 🙂 Also, I did not find a way to have the Flex objects react to one another and to the bone objects, which resulted in muscles that did not push realistically into the skin.
Muscle sims are sorely missing in 3ds Max (as many of you of course know), I hope to see some alternatives that solve my issues with Flex. Maybe even tyFlow could be used for this? I’ve seen some research using fluid sims for muscles, and that’s also something that would be great to see in Max (in any DCC actually).
But before 3ds Max gets decent muscle sims, I thinks it’s more important to get the rigs to run faster. I think the slow rigs is one of the biggest issues with character animation in Max IMO.
I think it baffles the mind that you can’t have both at the same time, one person is enough to create a muscle plugin if he is dedicated and talented while the rest of the team can focus on rigging improvements, and lets start with the Spline Ik. Better control interface and wire parameters.
Paul neale has a series of fantastic tutorials covering muscles in max using flex. Max has been always about using smaller tools combined to solve problems. I agree that nowadays a more specific solution for muscles should be needed, and also agree that before that max needs to solve other problems first. https://youtu.be/gBFX_5kJmrw
I know Neale’s work very well. And I myself used the muscle systems in SkinFX when it existed. Here is one of my rigs using SkinFX with Flex:
https://vimeo.com/18296827
Being able to combine small tools to solve problems is awesome, but A the small parts you need would have to actually exist, and B they need to be very very fast. And that’s not always the case 🙂
Nice example, also nice to see your rig in action there with good old SkinFX, if there was any muscle potential in Max, this was going to be it.
I wonder if autodesk bought the rights off of the dev when they got him in. If they only make it compatible with the latest Max versions and release it as is, it would solve half the muscle problems in max if not more.
If they have the license to do so then it would be a mystery as to why they have not done so already.
People are always asking for specialized tools for any whim. The strength of 3ds max is that it provides a universal set of tools. Just because someone doesn’t know how to do something doesn’t mean it’s impossible. For example, I know at least 4 ways to make muscles in 3ds Max.
By the way, a specialized system for creating muscles and interacting them with the skin in 3ds Max has been around for many years. CAT Muscle and Muscle Strand. I worked as an animator for a long time and I want to say that complex rigs in 3ds Max work faster than in Maya in many cases.
There are several ways, I agree. But I’ve yet to come across a method that doesn’t make the muscles look to stiff, while keeping them realistically contained inside skin. Would love to see a method that is solid and stable, especially for VFX use. If you have some to share, it would be nice to see.
I have my own rigging system for Max (which was made with the intent to create the fastest possible animation experience in Max. Feel free to check it out, I’m interested in feedback: http://www.superrune.com/tools/supersimplerig.php ) and I’ve also spent two years building rigs in Maya, and my experience is the opposite. While I think 3ds Max to be the superior program to use in most regards, there is something in the character pipeline that eats at the performance. I suspect that expression evaluation and the skin modifier have something to do with it, but there’s also some combination of constraints that seem to grind the rigs down.
Nice to see you here Superrune, I believe I have tried your rig before, at the time I was looking for fast solutions in max, I think it has a lot of potential! and would definitely be useful in a production.
I 100% agree with your statements.
In 2001, my two partners and I have dissolved our gfx-studio. On the last day, before we went out with our boxes, we have had an heavy, ugly quarrel.
This last quarrel, the culmination, was about the toiled lid, about if we should sit or stand in WC while pissing.
Actually we went apart because we have had no money, no jobs, no new ideas, no perspective. The Toiled-lid was the drop that has filled the barrel.
This discussion here remembers me on that days.
A small prototype video, looking like it comes from the distant past, with almost no production value, produces in short time a huge discussion. We have had ACT, CATMuscles, (what was the name – Pupetter), Hercules, heck – we even build Meta- and Parabones in BonesPro before our customers told us not to invest one minute more in Muscle-Dev, since hardly anyone uses Max for Charanim nowadays. Beside it, it appears to be useless: there are robust, fast, feature-rich, production-ready solutions in Maya, Houndini for it, and it can’t be exported as such in Reatime games… and so on.
Anyway, I think this discussion here is the toilet-lid analogy for the current situation in the 3ds Max scene.
There is no money, no jobs, no new idea and no clear perspective for character animation with it.
a very insightful take on this problem. however, i think most people might have sought other alternatives simply because autodesk havent given even the slightest hope about it.
particles was dying in 3ds max till tyflow came around. you should see all the wonders that have been created with it.
if autodesk turns a new leaf and gives it to us, something very easy and efficient, i have no doubt people will rather sim muscles in max.
this same discussion got me banned from STACK on facebook, which seems to be filled with blind fan_boys that would only praise autodesk for everything an =d nothing.
Yeah, everyone build`s his very own version of the universe, right?
Except that this whole discussion comes about by disrespectful behavior in the comments. Not sure what the 3ds max scene has to do with any of that.
Keep it on topic please.
Dave, while I was almost ready to believe you that the topic is something else, I must now reverse my opinion.
The topic is and has become the wrestle with facts around 3dsMax, CharacterToolset, Muscles and most of all – people. Just look at the comment from the “Guest” below. This is exactly what I was writing about.
This is the final stage of discussion, when one loudly shouts that something is not dead. Like “Punk is not dead!”. 🙂
What are you speaking of? Your deduction stands as Max not being a character tool set is not being negated today but when you mentioned something along the lines that it was never intended to be so, then I am here to correct that statement.
And this is not about you personally either.
Max started as a whole different animal in history, we are not here to discuss whether or not Max is dead today in one form or another, I am here to discuss what Max is missing and has been missing the past decade plus. I am here to remind other enthusiasts and users that Autodesk is feeding them candy all the while ignoring the features that would make the real difference. I’m sorry a large part of this is not subjective and I can put up an argument to every single point if need be.
I don’t find that an unreasonable argument to make. And I stand by those statements even though I don’t own Autodesk nor do I believe it’ll make any difference. At the very least it is a small footprint to make because this is the internet and because I can.
BTW: “Punk” is a trend, Car models are trends and what we wear today are trends and can die within years. Do you tell the engineer that the screwdriver is dead? Or do you give him a new mechanized one in an upgraded form to get the job done faster? I think this analogy is what keeps the discussion of tool sets longer than what is on the news today.
I wrote to David, not to you. Generally I do not write to Guests or fake user-names, this is the rule, I’m sorry.
Login with your name and portfolio, show your achievements and I promise, I will correct myself and anything i wrote if it was wrong.
How do you know David is his real name?
Don’t get me wrong but you seem to be taking whatever was said about a software personally? Don’t be like that, these posts have been a discussion, it is not a d*ck measuring contest.
Also it is never about the people behind the usernames, If the arguments aren’t to your liking then fine it is a free world.
The argument that Max is not a character tool is so full of Sh*t coming from self appointed righteous individuals that it hurts my mind and soul.
They may as well have told Blizzard back in 2001 to make those cinematics in Maya when the entire team were super talented Max generalists and never cared for sh*t for Maya (in retrospective their cinematic qualities dropped soonest the original team left and newcomers using Maya turned it into a corporate VFX house, how Ironic), how about telling Platige image today that their cinematics for The Witcher need to be done in Maya, how about Blur studios? those poor bastards were animating in Max all the way until in the end they started using a bit of Softimage, and that was literally killed!
Maybe Splinter cell and other game animators should’ve ditched Biped and gone full fledged manual rigging workflow to do the same exact thing, which would’ve doubled the game’s schedule release date and its cost!
Should I go on with some dozen incredible high end VFX studios using mostly Max for everything today?
The power of Max has always been about completing complex projects with small teams and making them look as good or better than things done in large pipelines.
We still have the same Morpher interface since the 90’s for gods sake! I can’t even F*ckin see the entire name of my morph channels because they are cropped, the UI can’t display them!!! I had to look for scripts just to see the names! My God people don’t you see why anything Autodesk does for things like viewports are no longer relevant? Thier senese of Priority is meant for the archviz crowd and that is it! They see max as an archviz toolset because that is what they think it is good for in their market!
Because they forced it to be like so! and promoted Maya as VFX character toolset!
This is why you have viewport and rendering updates (as if we need any more of it) and character toolset is in the roadmap only in areas that would benefit the archviz crowd such as populate and easy look at drag and drop modifiers!
platige image is using maya
Yes and they use or used to use Softimage in recent past. But they all started with Max and kept it that way for a very long time. Now Max switched to more assembly/render because reasons I mentioned above.
This is excluding a few seats of other software for potential new employees who prefer working in those for specific tasks.
Any archviz guy can prove you wrong. Improvements on viewport on hight quality are not that useful for archviz. I dont think neither archviz people uses mostly arnold. Most of the news on 2021 provide improvements on different sectors, but if I have to name one will be game development, not archviz.
I am totally with you, I am not someone that cares much about UI, but its totally true that someof the untouched UI in max for years affects productivity and need a total refresh. But look, you complain about not taking care about UI, and on 2021 you had a reborn baketotexture. I hope to see it in more places too.
Maybe the viewport is not aimed for archviz, I’m not sure how game dev production would benefit either, if you are a modeller, you don’t use the shaders and lights in the viewport, if you are a lookdev artist then you use the game engine to look dev 90% of the time. So which is it now?
But the populate crowd and other such tools are aimed at archviz.
I think ADSK has a different perception of what character animation in 3dsmax should be. It seems that they are focusing more on procedural Archviz crowd animation. Might also be useful for VFX and traditional character animation, but it
s not their main focus.t even have a native tool in 3dsmax, that allows you to deform an object with the help of another object/deformer. Muscles..he,he you guys!Muscles? We don
Just gonna drop this here:
https://vimeo.com/384543368
That’s very good rigging work.
But I guess it further proves the point about the muscles being its weakest part of the video.
By the way when we are discussing/arguing about Max character animation tools, we are not just referring to muscles but its many missing core systems. Muscles is just one big part of it. You have to better the skinning tools first before muscles, and before anything else you have to look into rigging shortcomings and improve on CAT/Biped.
Very Cooll
Muscles made of pudding
Anyway… is perfect enough to simulate certain rudimentary organic materials: Your brain, for example.
Maya has ZIVA VFX for muscles, so how hard can it be for Max? Max developers are focused on duplicating things that are already available for Max as plugins (Like good renders, fluid simulation) insead of developing things that are not available (Like muscle simulation).
Omg…. Your comments are like “that guys from NASA prefer to still messing with space things instead to provide the covid19 cure for us”…lol
You do know that the guys at NASA are trained to mess with that space thing and not trained in that infectious disease thing. But none the less you can’t have a serious character animation program and not have a decent muscle system- or even a half-way decent muscle system. But If the engineers at Max are working on a cure for COVID-19, I understand and look forward to hearing their findings.