What’s New in Rigging

	Maya Muscle Maya now includes the powerful Maya Muscle skin deformer, which provides you with a complete set of tools for muscle rigging and deformation effects. To learn more, see Introducing Maya Muscle. The following sections summarize the new features provided by Maya Muscle: Muscle creation Maya Muscle provides you with streamlined muscle creation workflows using the Muscle Builder or Muscle Creator. These tools let you quickly and intuitively create, sculpt, and orient muscles in order to create convincing character rigs. Using the Muscle Creator window, you can create muscles by growing them out to a surface, mirror muscles from one side of a character to the other, and control the muscle shape at different phases of contraction. See Creating Maya Muscles.
	Skin deformation The main Muscle deformer lets you set up muscle and skin deformation, but it can also be used as a standalone deformer. To use the Muscle deformer as a skin solution for Sticky or Sliding weights, you can quickly apply default weights, then paint weights on the mesh when you need a higher level of detail. You can also mirror weights from one side of a symmetrical mesh to the other. See Skin deformation. Re-use an existing skin set up If you already have a rig set up with skin clusters, you can use Maya Muscle to add detail without re-creating your existing skin to joint weighting. Muscle’s Relative Sticky mode lets you use your existing skin cluster setup and focus your efforts only on areas that benefit from additional muscle and skin detail. See Relative Sticky deformation.
	Other deformation effects Along with the main muscle/skin deformation tools, Maya Muscle provides several standalone deformers that can be used for any number of deformation effects. For example: Simulate effects based on natural forces like wind and gravity using the Force deformer. See Force deformation. Create high quality, detailed displacement and sliding effects based on curves or a 2D image map using the displacement options. See Displacement deformation and rendering. Set up Jiggle effects directly on each point of your skin mesh. See Per-Point Jiggle deformation. Apply Relax and Wrinkle effects to a mesh. See Relax deformation and Smooth deformation.
	Skin Collision Several skin collision features let you simulate realistic skin collision effects. Smart Collision, Self Collision, and Multi-Collision give you options for controlling muscle and skin shapes when collisions occur. See Collision to learn more, or refer to the following topics: Smart Collision Self Collision Multi-Object Collision