Impressive Cloth & Muscle Simulation Workflow Made in Blender
Sirdioz69 explained what makes it better than corrective blendshapes.
An artist known as Sirdioz69 on Reddit presented a fun cloth and muscle simulation wrapped around a dancing girl in Blender. The movement is smooth and nice, and the creator is ready to share their workflow with those curious and impressed.
Sirdioz69 manually retopologized the base mesh they sculpted and added a Multires modifier for the high-level details. They then duplicated the mesh, shrunk it, and sculpted the muscles using real-world references and other muscle setups.
"I masked out each individual muscle, split them, and remeshed them. I then created the physcial bones and used them to Boolean the muscle volumes. After further sculpting, I used Quad Remesher to retopologize the muscles. I then weight painted every single muscle individually with custom secondary weights for the pins. (Weighted to the bones and the pins are there to stop the sim from moving the muscle in a weird way.)
"To create organic movement, each muscle has its own Cloth Simulation with unique parameters for internal pressure and spring stiffness. I tuned each of these to ensure every muscle bulges and thins in the correct anatomical direction without losing any volume while handling both self collisions and external force collisions."
After, Sirdioz69 made a 'fat layer' by hollowing out the rendering mesh using a Boolean of all the muscles remeshed together. Where muscles are further away from the skin, the fat is thicker and more jiggly. Where they are closer to the surface, they make the character look leaner and more defined.
"This fat layer is the core of the sim. I applied hundreds of individually masked Surface Deforms to capture every muscle movement, then ran a cloth sim on that fat shell itself for secondary jiggles and for fixing any clipping issues. Corrective Smooth is my best friend here. Finally, I wrapped this in a proxy skin with its own cloth sim, compressed against the fat layer."
For the cloth simulation, Sirdioz69 used a proxy mesh and wrinkle maps driven by tension maps.
This project takes 3 seconds per frame to bake, and viewport playback shows only 5 FPS, so the artist had to export the entire simulation as an Alembic.
This workflow has a lot of advantages compared to corrective blendshapes, Sirdioz69 believes. It offers "perfect volume preservation, not an ounce lost," better deformations that dynamically respond to inputs, and collisions all over the body that can react to themselves and external forces.
Moreover, the artist mentions muscle jiggle with fast movements, the ability to retarget the muscle simulation to a different bipedal model with different topology, and skin wrinkles.
If you want to follow Sirdioz69 on this journey, check out their Reddit.
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