Character Rigger and Animator, Ty Viveiros has posted a couple of videos that shows off his handiwork. Particularly interesting is his use of Maya Muscle for preventing mesh penetrations in a rigging framework.
using Maya Muscle to drive the collisions between meshes
Ty notes that he experimented with constraints, direct connections, math nodes and even set driven keys, which is where more that a few people would have started.
The thing was, none of the paths took the rig where Ty wanted it to go. Some would only get him part way there, while other solutions were prone to breaking. Not getting the results that he was looking for Ty used Maya Muscle to drive the collisions between the meshes.
Ty says that the setup runs quite fast, and it can be a viable option for game rigs, since the setup can be deleted after the joints have baked animation applied.
Since the Maya Muscle setup for mesh penetrations doesn’t work right out of the box, Ty has mentioned that a tutorial might be forthcoming.
Ty also shows his first use of Maya Muscle for this task — an “auto-beard” that detected the boundaries of the character.
