Houdini Muscle Test
Written in 2021
I spent some time with Houdini's new Tissue/Muscle Solvers. I wouldn't call this test a success, but I learned a ton. These are my initial thoughts:
-As far as tools go, it's pretty complete. It was fairly straightforward to hook everything up. There are even tools for adding flexing when the joint reaches a certain length. Muscles can be procedurally set up or keyframed but I didn't bother with this test. Everything here is set for the muscles to be limp.
-It tough to balance the jiggling with how stiff it should be. Too stiff and you can't tell anything is happening. Too jiggly and it looks ridiculous. I went way too jiggly with this but eventually just got tired of testing.
-My biggest issue with it is that it sims very slowly. For this test it took about an hour for the muscles to simulate and well over two hours for the tissue solve. If I worked at a large studio, then it wouldn't be that hard to fire off at TOPs setup where I wedge the hell out of this and see which settings work best. But for someone who is just using their own computer, it makes it really hard to test which settings works best.
-The slow sim times are compounded by the massive amounts of settings to tweak. Do I adjust the muscle stiffness? Or maybe the constraints from muscle to bone? Or do the constraints muscle to muscle need to be stronger? Maybe the ends of the muscles or the tendons need to be stiffer? Maybe just on the shoulders, but the quads could have more jiggle?
-I also had trouble getting certain areas to be totally rigid. You can see the face and spikes move around like crazy.
-All this being said, the documentation is excellent. Overall, if the performance could be dramatically improved this would be awesome. It's still technically in Beta, so I'm hoping that the next version brings some speed improvements.
