Cheers for the help farbtopf but this does not look like it will work for me since I have gone way to far with things and my model is more than just a smoothed version of the basic geometry. From what I have read it looks as though to create a realistic rig with all the muscles deforming I need to do all of the weigting and influence objects on the high res model. My computer probably will not be able to cope with me doing animation with a dense mesh so I might skip the whole muscle deformation idea and work with something far less complex.