<p> </p><p>To build muscles to enhance the animation of a 3D character takes more time and effort than the standard character rig. In some cases, the muscles will not be noticeable and therefore are unnecessary. This research tried to find the moments when the muscles did or did not make a difference. The new Maya Muscle System is also explored and the procedure to create muscles for a standard rig is explained. The test that was performed showed that the muscles are more noticeable in all cases.</p><p> </p>

To build muscles to enhance the animation of a 3D character takes more time and effort than the standard character rig. In some cases, the muscles will not be noticeable and therefore are unnecessary. This research tried to find the moments when the muscles did or did not make a difference. The new Maya Muscle System is also explored and the procedure to create muscles for a standard rig is explained. The test that was performed showed that the muscles are more noticeable in all cases.

There are several different setups for facial rigs today, joint-based and blendshape-based are two popular examples, both of them fall in the category of geomtetry-based facial rigs. The goal with this dissertation is to attempt to develop a Maya muscle facial rig. Then the rig is tested to examine to see where this rig can be an improvement in relation to other rigging systems. It was possible to create a rig using the Maya muscle system. There was an attempt to reach out to the public and get some opinions but it was to weak so no real conclusions could be drawn from it. This rig was most useful when creating stylized cartoon characters. The Maya muscle rig has several substantial flaws that is weighted against several cons that reveal that this is a niche rig that is useful in some areas but should be completely avoided in the game industry.