Ziva VFX-Inspired Physics-Based Muscle Simulation System
Shirzad Bahrami is working on his own tool.
Shirzad Bahrami, an EA Technical Artist whose excellent article on physics-based fish animation we recently featured, has been sharing a new project he's been developing. It's a muscle simulation tool inspired by Ziva VFX, whose absence has left a noticeable gap in the industry.
The artist published tests addressing two challenges he had faced before: a proper tet cage that can deliver high-quality simulations across different meshes, including muscle, fat, and other tissues, and using VisMesh-based attachment constraints, where collisions and attachments are applied directly to the visible mesh rather than the simulation mesh.
Alongside the existing XPBD implementation, he added the Finite Element Method (FEM) to the solver and was quite satisfied with the results:
"This is why FEM is superior to XPBD for muscle simulation. For a long time, I couldn't understand why my muscle simulations didn't look as good as those produced by Ziva VFX, but now I do. FEM is more computationally intensive, but it produces much more accurate results when it comes to simulating muscle and fat tissue."
His latest update adds sliding attachments between the inner muscles and bones, along with a C++ implementation for some of the heavier computations to improve performance:
"The behavior feels natural thanks to the accurate FEM simulation. There's still a lot more to add, but I'm really enjoying the process."
The 3D asset featured in this post comes from AdonisFX, a digital anatomy framework for Maya and Houdini. It's increasingly being viewed as an alternative to Ziva VFX.
As for performance, Shirzad says that "as expected for FEM, it's not fast to simulate." He's planning to keep XPBD for lookdev and use FEM for final tests.
It looks like we can expect more updates on the project in the future, so follow along on LinkedIn and subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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