Adventdestiny
Hey - you're right, the mathematics behind what's happening with Ziva VFX is very complex but the implementation is super intuitive to use. (At at least we think so!)
Have you seen my thread on making a lion? You can see an overview of the workflow throughout the posts. Currently a typical Ziva creature is solved in passes. Use normal Maya rigging / animation workflow to get the motion of the creature's bones. Use Alembic to cache the animated bone geometry. In another scene, import that alembic cache to drive the tissues. At this point you are no longer adjusting the animation, rather, you're adjusting the tissue settings etc to get muscle performance right for the bone motion you've animated in the previous "pass"
Hope that makes some sense