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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
Switch to the Muscle object’s States tab in the Attribute Manager. Open “Min” and “Max” by clicking their small
gray triangles. The two curves shown control the shape of the muscle when stretched and contracted. But first
we need to set the minimum and maximum length for the muscle.
Make sure that the animation is at frame 0 (the scene already contains an animation). Click on “Set Max” in the
Attribute Manager. This stretches the arm to automatically find out the longest length the muscle needs to be.
This length is entered automatically into the Length field. Next, move to frame 15 of the animation.
The arm is now bent. Click on “Set Min” in the Attribute Manager. Again, the muscle’s current length is stored.
The only parameter left to set now is “Strength”. We will set the top “Strength” parameter to 130% because
that’s exactly how thick we want it to be when contracted.
It’s the bottom “Strength” that needs to be adjusted. Set it to 20% so that it’s reduced to 20% of its full thickness
when the muscle is stretched. Click on the “Play” button in the animation toolbar. The muscle should bulge as
it contracts. But what’s the point of the muscle getting thicker when it’s the skin that needs to bulge? After all,
the muscle itself shouldn’t be directly visible later on. This is where the Muscle deformer comes in.
Stop the animation and choose Character/Muscle Deformer in the main menu. We need to make the deformer
a child of the polygon object that is being deformed, which in this case is the object “human_arm_mesh”. For
the deformation to work correctly, the order in the Object Manager should be: polygon mesh / Skin deformer
/ Muscle deformer.