Hercules

For all of those who thought musculature systems were only for major production studios, there is now an answer for everyone. Hercules is a revolutionary musculature animation system plug-in for 3ds max, and has been created in an effort to raise the bar for character animation.

Hercules is simply the most effective and artist-friendly way to create high quality muscle animation for your characters. Adding that extra touch of realism to the motion of your creatures and characters is easy and they will truly come to life! Hercules’ muscles primitives will help create realistic bulging, wobbling and sub-surface deformations beneath the skin of your characters when they move.

Simply drag out muscles and attach them to your character’s existing skeleton rig or Biped. They will deform right away, squashing and stretching as your creation moves within your scene.

Hercules also works in concert with all of the current skinning modifiers like the built-in Skin, Physique and Bones Pro, so that the skin will react based on the underlying muscles’ deformations.

At the core of the Hercules technology are the following modules:

- A parametric “Muscle” primitive object
- An Objects-based displacement modifier
- A parametric muscle texture map
- A mass editing tool

Hercules Key Features and Benefits:

- Easy interface and workflow, making the musculature setup quick, effective and easy to to integrate within your current production pipeline

- Fast secondary motion dynamics (spring-based) on muscles

- Back transformation, to avoid double transformations when muscles are linked to another master node, very handy in most character setups

- Ultra-Fast Skin Displacement Deformer that can be applied on top of your preferred skinning method to simulate sub-surface muscle deformations

- No object restrictions, any type of objects, not only Muscles, can be used as deformer objects

- Fully compatible with most character animations plug-ins, including Skin, Physique, Bones Pro and Biped

- Network render friendly

Hercules v1 Demo (2.4 MB)