Realtime Muscles and Bones of the Upper Arm and the Shoulder

In this project I studied various ways how to visualize muscles in realtime and in VR in a decent way.
My aim was to simulate the muscle contractions and soft body behaviour but I was restricted by my own capabilities. Which means I'm just a 3D Artist with some basic coding skills and I don't have the time and the abilities: e.g. to develop my own realtime soft body deformers.

So I tried the OBI Cloth and Unitys own cloth solution for faking volume preserving deformations. I also tried uFlex - the Nvidia Flex Plugin in Unity and even Blendshapes. But in the end I came across a bone based rig which is used to control the muscles and their contractions and orientations. It turned out that the bone based approach was the fastest and most efficient way for me. So I sticked to this.

I also aimed to maintain as much flexibility for the textures of the muscles as I could. All muscles are using the same Substance Material to quickly make changes afterwards in terms of style and materiality

Date
July 16, 2018