Hey! I’m making a muscle & tissue simulation for a humanoid character. This is my personal project so I’m slowly experimenting with it. I feel it will take more time to make things right, but mostly I feel that movements and the overall look are getting close to what I want.
However, I’m having trouble with palms/fingers and wanted to ask for the usual approaches.

Contrary to other parts, with palms I try to put tissue directly on the bones. The movements feel a bit abnormal. Sometimes I can get an adequate look, but it still lacks the details and cleanness that I could achieve in other parts. I’ve tried many things, like putting the tip part of the fingers in the rigid group or limiting the shrinking substantially. It doesn’t seem to be “right”.

So, I’m curious about your experiences.
Maybe you skipped palms entirely to animate them separately/put them into the rigid group? Maybe you did find a good way to simulate it along with everything else? If so, did you use tissue directly on the bones or maybe you made an improvised muscle layer for the palms?
Would be happy to hear any experiences and ideas. Maybe I'm missing something. Thanks!

Extremities are usually animated separately and blended back onto the final quadmesh. Tissue simulation is typically avoided in these areas by either chopping them off, or grouping them into the rigid group. The rigid group will only help with constraining the points in finicky areas, or, where sometimes bones are intentionally penetrating the outer tissue layer.

However, if you are going to simulate hands/fingers, ensure you have enough of the Core layer present in these areas, and, that there is adequate weight in the @corefalloff attribute.
The Core layer is constrained to the muscles and bones and the attachment strength is modulated by the @corefalloff point attribute. The core layer is what will "follow" your bone animation most directly. The outer tissue layer is then constrained to the core, effectively animating the tissue from the inside-out.

Hey John,

Ive got a rigid group of hands, feet and head points. In the sim, the tissue is rigid there but the hands go completely floppy at the wrists and feet at the ankles! Weird behaviour. Any ideas how to stop that?

Do you have your rigid group enabled and specified on the tissue solver?

Do you have bones in that region in your second input?

My guess is that you don't have any hand or feet bones. You'll want to include them if you want your hands and feet included in the tissue sim. If you don't have hand or foot bones you'll want to cut the hands and feet off for your tissue sim, which is what is usually done in production as John mentioned above.

If you do have bones there, then have you tried increasing the rigid stiffness/damping ratio?