For all those who thought muscular systems were only for major production studios and required complex custom rigging and scripting Hercules, Di-O-Matic’s innovative muscular animation plug-in for 3ds max.

At long last, a tool for expanding the limits of regular skinning. Hercules is the most effective and artist-friendly manner in which to create high quality muscle animation for your CG characters. Adding an extra touch of realism to your creatures and characters is now easier than ever before and certain to bring them to life!

Intro to Hercules

Sub-skin deformations

Simply drag Hercules muscles and attach them to your character’s existing rig. They will immediately deform, bulge, compress and stretch as your CG character moves within your scene. Or use any 3D object to simulate sub-surface deformations. Hercules deformation supports just about any 3D object.

Hercules works together with all 3ds max skinning modifiers like the built-in Skin, Physique and Bones Pro. Hercules works wonders on existing skinning by causing the skin to react based on underlying muscle deformations.

Upgrade your characters to Hercules and see the difference!

Watch the following videos and discover the power of Hercules

See Hercules in Action!

4 muscles per leg

Secondary motion

At the core of the Hercules technology are the following modules:

- A parametric Muscle primitive object
- An Objects-based displacement modifier
- A parametric muscle texture map
- A Bulk editing tool

Hercules Key Features and Benefits:

- Easy interface and workflow, making the musculature setup quick, effective and easy to to integrate within your current production pipeline

- Fast secondary motion dynamics (spring-based) on muscles

- Back transformation, to avoid double transformations when muscles are linked to another master node, very handy in most character setups

- Ultra-Fast Skin Displacement Deformer that can be applied on top of your preferred skinning method to simulate sub-surface muscle deformations

- No object restrictions, any type of objects, not only Muscles, can be used as deformer objects

- Fully compatible with most character animations plug-ins, including Skin, Physique, Bones Pro, CAT, Biped and Puppetshop

- Network render friendly

- Scripting support, to easily fit in your pipeline

- Float Licensing, so you can share license(s) across your network.

Cannot find the answer to your questions? Contact us and we will be glad to assist you

Only registered users of Hercules currently subscribed to one of the yearly support packages (Premium, Premium+, VIP) are eligible to receive the latest version listed below. Please contact us to receive it.

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Version 1.3  04/15/2010
	* Added compatibility with 3ds max 2011 (32-bit and 64-bit) * Hercules Select: Improved stability with Poly objects * Muscles: remove with right-click menu fixed * Improved Cluster-O-Matic support in HerculesDeform modifier

Version 1.2  05/11/2009
	* Added compatibility with 3ds max 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit) * HerculesDeform: significant speed improvement when working with selections (made in HerculesSelect or Cluster-O-Matic) deformer list now display 20 deformers new option to display deformers as box Cluster-O-Matic refresh issues: fixed negative deform not supporting smoothing: fixed TAB ordering issue: fixed

Version 1.1  04/03/2008
	* Fully compatible (32-bit and 64-bit) with 3ds max 9, 3ds max 2008 and 3ds max 2009 * HerculesSelect: Ignore backfacing on Poly object issue: fixed * HerculesDeform: new Re-Cache Subdivision button

Version 1.02  10/30/2006
	* Support 3ds max 6 to 3ds max 9 * Bug related to muscles attachment to biped legs fixed * Fix Undo issue when removing HerculesSelect from modifier stack * Improved Cluster-O-Matic support in HerculesDeform modifier

Version 1.01  10/16/2004
	* Speed optimization for the Hercules Deform modifier, up to 10 times faster.

Version 1.0  04/06/2004
	* Initial release