Veda Body Rig

Last Updated on 23/11/2025

Rigging

To attain high-quality transformation of the body, it was needed that the rig be composed not only of bones but also of muscles. For the basic skeleton, Biped was chosen. The other variants were also considered. The CAT was rejected for instability of its work in the 2011 and 2012 versions of 3ds Max, while constructing the skeleton with bones needed too much time for study and didn’t give any considerable advantages for creating my character.

While creating muscles I considered different instruments—plugins such as CAT muscles, CAT muscle strands, the SkinFX plugin, the Hercules plugin, and the ACT plugin. During the process of acquaintance with the tools, I have worked out and written maxscript MuscleSelect, allowing quick selection of a necessary part of the muscle, which supports all the solutions mentioned above. As the result of this selection, CAT muscles, CAT muscle strands, and SkinFX were chosen. The CAT Muscle Strand allowed for considerable improvement in the places of bending in shoulders, knees, and elbows in comparison with using only Biped.
Transformation of such muscles as biceps and triceps needed a more complicated solution. The best solution turned out to be the usage of a modified CAT muscle strand with SkinFX. I also worked out and wrote a scripted modifier, allowing me to extend the possibilities of the CAT Muscle Strand as well as to correct some errors emerging while working with it.

Skinning

For skinning Veda, I used the Skin modifier, which allows reattaching an already skinned mesh even if the topology is changed. The SkinFX plugin was used to attach muscles (modified CAT Muscle Strands) to the mesh. I had to modify SkinFX in order for it to work with the CAT muscle strands and also to improve it. The main result of this improvement is the possibility to reattach muscles to mesh. The mirror function of the SkinFX plug-in has also been improved. The result was the pipeline, allowing the correction of topology and character model even at the final stage of animation and, thanks to that, saving time.