Maya Muscle and facial setup problem

[gaviez]

Hello everybody

I'm developing a character and using Maya Muscle for the skinning. The thing is that way: First of all, I used joints and weighted de mesh to them. Then, I created a series of CV curves over the face, put clusters in every control vertex and point contrained every cluster to a diferent control curve. Then, I added the CV curves as influences to the skin cluster, in order to achieve a cool facial setup. The problem is that when I converted de Skin cluster to a muscle system, The facial setup stopped working. I need to know how can I make it works with the muscle system, or if there's any option to control the facial setup with the skin cluster and the rest of the body with the muscle system... I don't know how to proceed. Maybe with any indirect skinning method..?

I tried converting de CV curves to muscle objects, but it happens that deformation only takes place when you move the complete CV curve, and not when moving the control vertex, so it only works in object mode. Another thing I'm trying is to deactivate the muscle system, activate the skin cluster again and add both muscles and curves as influences, but when I do that, the mesh breaks in a very bad way. This problem occurs whe I assign weights to the curves, but all the mesh crashes.

Anyone knows what could I do?

Thanks a lot

[gaviez]

Finally I found out another and very similar way that seems to work properly. With a wire deformer, I can get the same results. Un fortunately, to have the muscle system and the deformers aplied at the same time, makes the thing going too slowly, so I,m gonna try with blendshapes, modeling it with the help of the old facial setup, in order to see if that works better.