For some animations, simply attaching the skin and correcting its vertex assignments results in an animated skin you can use in final renderings. For other animations, you might need to give the skin more realistic movement: for example, muscles that bulge.
Physique lets you simulate an underlying musculature for the skin by adding tendons and bulges:
At any joint angle, you can define a bulge angle, and you may define as many bulge angles as needed. The bulge angle consists of the current orientation of the joint together with any defined cross sections. In addition, you can adjust the influence of a bulge angle. Physique considers all the bulge angles as the character moves. The resulting bulge is created by interpolating the effects of the various bulge angles having some influence at the current joint angle.
For example, to create a bulging biceps muscle, in Bulge sub-object level, on a selected link, insert a cross section near the center of the upper arm. Pose the arm into a flexed position, with the angle between upper and lower arms at 90 degrees or less. Insert a bulge angle and adjust the cross section so that it distorts the mesh appropriately. In the viewports and in the Bulge Editor, you can edit the shape of the bulge to look like a flexed biceps muscle: higher and wider above the bone than below it. Now as the elbow bends from a straight orientation up and toward the shoulder, Physique bulges the biceps appropriately.
see Creating Bulges for more information about creating bulges.
Because bulges are optional, you can approach Physique animation in a couple of ways:
Bulges simulate bulging muscles. Physique creates bulges based on bulge angles and cross section shapes you specify, not on keyframe settings.
A bulge angle associates an angle value and a name. By default, each link has one bulge angle whose default name is the name of the link followed by "Bulge 0". The default bulge angle's initial angle value is the angle between the link and its child when you first attach Physique to the skeleton.
The Bulge Editor duplicates many of the controls available at the Bulge sub-object level. It gives you a focused, two-dimensional view of the current bulge settings.