WORKFLOW

1. Add the Skin FX modifier to your mesh
牋?(I.e. on top of 'Skin', 'Physique' or any other modifier)
2. Add the objects you want to slide over to the modifier
3. Paint the weights (how much sliding per vertex)

PERFORMANCE

Skin FX offers parametric objects that are very fast to calculate. If you choose to use the parametric objects to slide over, Skin FX will hardly make a dent in your scene's overall performance. If you choose to use a lot of custom mesh shapes (i.e. custom rigged muscles) performance will be lower, but at anytime you can choose to (temporarly) disable all Skin FX calculations, which increases the viewport performance dramatically (i.e. only enable at render-time).

Skin FX can also be faded out further away from the camera, making the overall performance impact even smaller, especially in scenes with mutliple characters using Skin FX.

MUSCLE SHAPES

Skin FX will work with build-in parametric objects such as capsules and spheres and the build-in muscle primitive, but it also works with any other (editable) mesh object inside 3dsmax. It does not limit you to pre-defined muscles or objects, so you can easily rig any type of geometry to be used as the muscle or deformer object. This allows you to easy create many different types of muscle, fine tuned for your specific character and scene.

CODE

The 'Skin FX' modifier and parametric objects are written in C++ for performance, but the entire UI and Plug-in are controlled via Maxscript. This gives technical artists the ability to customize and fine tune their workflow such as adding your own brushes to paint weights with, or adding buttons to quickly spawn your own custom muscles. All data in Skin FX is accesible via maxscript, which makes exporting the data to another application easy.