rotheror
Hey Robin --
Thanks for the comments, we're excited too! Hopefully I can answer your questions..
Those steps looks like you've covered the ground for a character ready for production. They don't necessarily have to happen in that order, and many of them can be done concurrently.
You don't need to have the final skin modeled before rigging the character. You just really need the basic proportions to start. One great thing about the Ziva workflow, is that if you want to change the position of the skeleton/muscles later on in the process, you can do so, and transfer the Ziva stuff easily to the updated models (using zBuilder)
With a rigged character, from Ziva's perspective, what you're interested in is getting good skeleton animation. Your rigged character should drive some skeleton geometry. We recommend that you bake out the skeleton geometry to an Alembic. When it comes to solving muscles, you import the bake and use it to drive the matching skeleton in your Ziva setup.
When I say 'drive' I simply mean doing something like creating a blendshape between the corresponding bones.
Some examples:
r_humerus_bone_driver -> r_humerus_bone_driven
pelvis_bone_driver -> pelvis_bone_driven
The driven bones are Ziva bones, to which your Ziva muscles are attached 🙂
For clarity, none of the animation rig is imported. Not the Maya joints, controllers, skin clusters or anything like that. You just take the baked skeleton and use it to drive the Ziva muscles in separate scene.
Hope this helps your understanding!
Cheers,
Andy