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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
7. Quick Tutorial – Muscles
Welcome to Muscles, the personal fitness training program for your CINEMA 4D characters. If your character has
been hanging around idly because it hasn’t been animated for so long, now it’s time to give it some muscles.
With MOCCA V3, you can take character animation to the next level with virtual muscles that flex beneath the
skin.
You need the following for a basic muscles setup: a Muscle object that is “pinned” between two joints, and a
Muscle deformer that is a child of the polygon object the muscles should affect.
Let’s start with a scene that shows you muscles in action. Open the file “QS_Muscles_Final.c4d”. The muscle
deforms the geometry to simulate realistic muscle movement. For a further example of muscles at play, open
the file “QS_Muscles_Final_Joints.c4d”.
Once you have finished taking a look at the examples, open the file “QS_Muscles_Start.c4d”. This is our starting
point. It’s time to add some muscle.
Create a Muscle object (main menu/Character/Muscle Object). In the Attribute Manager, on the Fixings tab,
you’ll find two empty fields under “Pins”. Drag “Joint.1” from the Object Manager into the top field and drag
“Joint.2” into the bottom field.
You can see the result immediately in the editor. We’ve told the muscle where it should start and end, but the
default offset of 200 for the second pin’s Z-axis makes the muscle jut out so that it’s not between the two joints
as we’d like it to be. Set the value from 200 down to 10.
The muscle now lies exactly between the two points, but why the offset of 10? This parameter is extremely
important for the muscles to work correctly. To see why it’s necessary, open the file “QS_Muscles_Comparison.
c4d”. In the bottom example, you can see that pin number 2 (the end of the muscle) is exactly on “Joint.2”. This
prevents the muscle from being able to contract when the arm bends. In the top example, pin number 2 is away
from “Joint.2” and this allows the muscle to contract and bulge as the arm bends. Select the “QS_Muscles_Start.
c4d “ file from the Window menu.