Absolute Character Tools 1.6 Pro (or "ACT" for short) is a sophisticated musculature system for 3ds maxª that helps you add extra realism and believability to characters that you create and animate. ACT gives you several new object classes for modeling muscles and skins and also has a whole skin deformation technology that does both sub-skin deformation and in-skin deformation. It is extremely fast, stable, customizable, and open for scripting and wiring. It works the way character riggers and animators expect and comes with a comprehensive set of tools that are targeted at increasing its efficiency in heavy production environments.
Central to ACT 1.6 are its cgMuscle and cgTube primitives. These are the fundamental building blocks for creating muscle rigs and skins for your characters. And building them couldn`t be easier. cgMuscles and cgTubes are fully parametric objects, so you can quickly drag them out in the 3ds max viewports like you would any other primitive type. Once built, you attach them to your existing skeleton and can immediately begin to test their motion. Since the ACT primitives have their dynamics built into their core, they will automatically begin to squash and stretch as your skeleton moves. And you have complete control over that motion with a number of powerful dynamics engines to tweak your results. Finally, once you have the cgMuscles moving and deforming the way you like, you can add the special ACT deformation to your character`s skin so that it reacts realistically to the musculature you`ve built beneath it.
And now with ACT 1.6 Pro, you now get another powerful addition: cgAdam and cgEve. These fully set up and ready-to-animate models come with complete set of bones, cgMuscles and sub-skin surface made from cgTubes. They are a great reference for you to be able to see how and where muscles are set up.