Part I

cgMuscles allow you to give the impression that there`s something moving, buldging or sliding under a surface.

Skin your character, then create and place muscles where you need to, to get the effect your after.
There`s no need to fill the enitire volume of your character or object.

cgMuscle detail
If you need to smooth cgMuscles out its best to make use of the cgSmooth modifier. You can put this on at render time, and work with fast, low resolution muscles. It makes things a lot easier to edit a low poly muscles.

It`s best to start with really low rez, and add detail as you go. The tail above is the same resoultion as I used when I started modelling the leg muscles. I added cross sections as more shape was needed..

...added cgSmooth modifiers to the muscles to make them look a bit nicer at render time, it also improves the results when you come to use them as nodes to deform a surface.You can see the difference in muscle rez from the two images above.

Here`s how he`s looking so far..... click the image above to download an avi rotation showing the muscles, 770 kB Divx avi

I`ve been modelling the skin, and now have the muscles deforming, giving the skin its shape.