For some animations, simply attaching the skin and correcting its vertex assignments results in an animated skin you can use in final renderings. For other animations, you might need to give the skin more realistic movement: for example, muscles that bulge.
Physique lets you simulate an underlying musculature for the skin by adding tendons and bulges:
- Bulges change the skin's profile to simulate bulging muscles. You create the bulge by establishing bulge angles, relationships between cross-sectional slices of the skin and specific poses of the skeleton joint. Imagine a cross section to be a slice through the skin's mesh, perpendicular to the link. By making changes to cross sections, you in turn distort the shape of the mesh. Bulges in your character can be constructed by associating certain poses with related changes to the cross sections, in other words by defining bulge angles.
At any joint angle, you can define a bulge angle, and you may define as many bulge angles as needed. The bulge angle consists of the current orientation of the joint together with any defined cross sections. In addition, you can adjust the influence of a bulge angle. Physique considers all the bulge angles as the character moves. The resulting bulge is created by interpolating the effects of the various bulge angles having some influence at the current joint angle.
For example, to create a bulging biceps muscle, in Bulge sub-object level, on a selected link, insert a cross section near the center of the upper arm. Pose the arm into a flexed position, with the angle between upper and lower arms at 90 degrees or less. Insert a bulge angle and adjust the cross section so that it distorts the mesh appropriately. In the viewports and in the Bulge Editor, you can edit the shape of the bulge to look like a flexed biceps muscle: higher and wider above the bone than below it. Now as the elbow bends from a straight orientation up and toward the shoulder, Physique bulges the biceps appropriately.
see Creating Bulges for more information about creating bulges.
Because bulges are optional, you can approach Physique animation in a couple of ways:
- Apply only as much detail as you need to get the effect you want for a particular scene in your animation. This is probably the best approach when the Physique animation is meant to be used only once, or is not the main focus of the animation.
- Define a fully deformable character, with bulges for its entire range of motion. This is probably the best approach when you intend to reuse the Physique character in an ongoing series of animations, for example, or in a video game that has a variety of character action.