Human Anatomy for Illustration

[Zachris_Pensar]

Hey, I was also thinking about contacting the medical university in Stockholm to see if I could do the same thing, but haven’t come to do it yet. The great thing with Arcland’s Atlas is that he rotates the bones so you can always pause and that way get a view of most angles, and also the use of “fresh” cadavers instead of usual beige ones you find mostly online or on youtube. I have bookmarked tons of websites with references but thought maybe these could be handy unless you’ve already seen them

These are in Russian but works well with translate page if you use chrome.
http://vmede.org/sait/?page=4&id=Anatomija_bili4_t1&menu=Anatomija_bili4_t1
http://vmede.org/sait/?page=2&id=Anatomija_bili4_t1&menu=Anatomija_bili4_t1
http://vmede.org/sait/?page=3&id=Anatomija_bili4_t1&menu=Anatomija_bili4_t1

This one might not be new to you or it’s content, I found it useful though.
http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/glossary/

Here’s a nice little read on skeletal variation among humans.
http://bio.sunyorange.edu/updated2/creationism/macroevolution/22%20SKELETAL%20VARIATIONS.htm

This guy posts now and then good videos about the bones.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoKblvFlTW3yxgM7gKmmohQ/videos

Vertebral Column.
http://bio.sunyorange.edu/updated2/ap.HTML/1%20vertebrae.htm

Human skeleton.
http://homepage.smc.edu/wissmann_paul/physnet/anatomynet/anatomy/humanskeleton.html

More bones…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/54066547@N02/

Nice image of sphenoid.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/artsewp/4735144314/sizes/l/

Dissection and plastination.
http://www.anatomyumftm.com/

This page has tons of great illustrations in good resolution when you click on each image.
https://bedahunmuh.wordpress.com/page/219/

Be sure to check out this thread unless you already have
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?178609-Anatomypunk

And finally…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gray's_Anatomy_plates

Looking forward to your next update!

[Daniel_Biggers]

I love it. Thank you so much for all the reference. That is awesome.
Maybe it will keep me from buying another book.
I have had to sit through several cadaver dissection videos
in hopes to learn more about insertion point location and how the
muscles lay over each other.
While the videos have been truly informative I can honestly say I prefer blood and seeing fresh skin tissue
vs. seeing cadaver tan brown flesh any day of the week.
I will put more time on the project this week.

I just check out the links and you have helped a ton with reference there is some awesome stuff in there. One thing that stood out as disturbing was the classical music they played while doing plastination http://www.anatomyumftm.com/#!__p-videos caught me off guard a bit.

[Daniel_Biggers]

I finally have all the bones in except some of the sesamoid bones and the hyoid bone. I am sooo happy to have gotten this far.
I still have a lot of detail sculpting to add but I am happy with the progress. I plan to separate the skull as well, its a bit daunting after seeing
the details involved in it after being done and separated by another Zbrusher. Comments and critiques are welcome.

[jan19]

I commend you for tackling this project!

Trying to sculpt my first “from scratch” character now, and of course, I don’t know much about anatomy.

Doing the skeleton, and covering it with muscles, would be a great way to learn how to sculpt what’s under the skin.

Your skeleton is looking mighty fine!

[tigerheart]

It’s a good job overall but i feel like the leg are a bit short, you might want to double check their proportion

[Daniel_Biggers]

jan19: Thank you. Sadly I started the project about this time last year, which is another reason I am glad I am at this stage, but there is still a long road to go.
I might break away and do a cartoon style character so I can see something else on my desktop, and then start on the muscles.

tigerheart: Thank you for the comment. Ill check it out, it does seem a bit short to me as well now that you mentioned it.

Once again I want to say I have a lot of respect for the others that have taken on this skeletal project before me. When it comes to the muscles I know I am
probably going to think back and say that doing the skeleton was easier. I can say that even though I have experience in the medical field doing this project has really helped
out with names and landmarks that I did not know before.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Here is the latest. I also did a pose cause I got tired of looking at the same boring T-ish pose. Zbrush crashed just as I was saving the image. I am thinking its because my model is so dense at its highest levels (cant wait to see how Z64 handles the model, tired of crashes, expecially while I am saving the model).
I did however figure out a nice trick. Once I had the Zbrush is not responding do you want to wait message. I waited about 15 minutes (which was not easy to do) and I still had the error. Since I only did the pose for fun but didn’t want to lose the image (or time spent),
I took a screenshot of it cropped it in PS and fixed the contrast/brightness levels. Its not as good as the full res version but at least I got what I was looking for which was just a different posed image to add some personality in the art.

[Callister]

Hi Daniel,

Great work so far, I’ve built a skeleton and muscle system in Zbrush before myself so I know the sheer task at hand, you’ve been making some really good progress so far so I can’t wait to see the final result. I think the proportions now look much better, for me the diagrams from Paul Richer’s Artistic Anatomy helped me a lot. I think the biggest thing that would need to be changed is actually the skull, the shape of the skulls eye sockets look a little too big, and I think that the side of the skull could have much more roughness too it. Back in my old work we we’re able to order in a real skull and it’s actual texture is really quite rough. I would also round out the patellas a little bit more, as their quite round in real life. Maybe get some nice cracks on the skull aswell. The final thing I would say is that the gaps between the vertebrae could be a little narrower.
Ultimately though I really like the direction it’s going in, clearly you’ve done a lot of research and I don’t think it needs any major changes, just some small tweaks here and there. Great job.

I’ve also attached some images from Thyme, it’s a reference I used quite a lot and can give a good idea of the texture of the skull.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Callister: Thank you for the comments and critiques. I will definitely check out your resource reference. As for the skull I have plans to split it into sections so the sutures will be there once that is done since it will be separate geometry.
I had reference images that matched the eye sockets, but by the time I am done sculpting and splitting it I am sure it will have a different shape. I do see what you mean about them looking too big from your reference image though.
I also plan to work on the teeth and make them more accurate including the roots in case I do a cutaway or have a glass skull for an illustration in the future. Thank you for the reference image again. I have access to the medical university right next to my hospital,
the cool thing is that they offered me the chance to take photos of subjects/cadavers since they work closely with the hospital I work at. Maybe when I get the chance I can get some good reference there for skulls. If you see anything else just let me know.

[Alexander_Kafoussias]

Hi Daniel!

Your skeleton is looking really nice I like the proportions of the guy, it feels very natural to me.
These kind of project can go on forever if you jump around too much before really nailing down something before allowing yourself to move on. There are a lot of variation that naturally occurs on skeletons, which makes it really difficult to say if something is right or wrong. For example, your ribcage looks very different from the one I did, but not becuase its is right or wrong, but because you have made an aestetical decision about it, which is great, it gives the work a lot of confidence and a solid look.

One thing that maby could get a tiny bit better, from a mechanical perspective, are the joints. Some of them are really well developed, like the elbow joint, but some of them feels a little bit undefined and could need some visual explanation in regards to their function. The knee joint and the condyles of the femur and tibia for example could need some work (as well as the proportions of them compared to each other). This will become very important when you later attach muscles and also when you pose the skeleton.

About the crashes, consider splitting up the skeleton into parts (different subtools and then use polygroups to separate things further) and use Zremesher to create subdivision levels for it. That way, if you want to pose him you can do that while using only the lowest subdivision level and then turn it up to max when rendering only. Or if you want to work on the skull then you can turn the whole skeleton to the lowest subdiv level while maintaining a high subdiv level on the skull only while you work.

And press the “Compact mem” - button before doing some high intensive memory operation, it helps

Either way, amazing work dude, I enjoy your journey and I do appreciate the time you’ve put into it, I can see you work very hard on it. Keep it up!

Best,
Alexander

[Daniel_Biggers]

Hello Alexander,

Thank you for the information and compliment. I think with the skull item mentioned in an earlier post by Callister, I have changed some of the proportions along the way and that can definitely be the reason it is off now. The skull was the first thing I started on awhile ago so I know it has been changed and needs more attention. As far as the project going on forever, you are not kidding!!! I wish I had more time to spend on it too which is an uphill struggle, but worth it. As far as the rib cage goes, the intercostal spaces look right from several different reference images I have and models I have seen, but if I palpate my own ribs they seem much closer together so I am not sure what to do exactly.

For the joints the legs were done early on due to needing them quickly for a medical illustration with an external fixator before I even started the full skeleton project. I definitely plan on refining them and brushing over the whole model to add more definition.
The knee joint has been an eyesore since just as you said the other areas are getting more time and that is very undefined IMO at this point. Can you elaborate more on the comment of the proportions between the tibia and fibula.

For the crashes I did have all the bones in a separate subtool at one time while I was going along, then I started condensing them and used polygroups so that I could manipulate/move things together like the legs and feet or the arms and hands, and also sculpt/move separately by using the topological options.
I can seperate them all again , if it improves performance it will be worth it and save time on crashes and unsaved events. Ill try that and hope it helps, it has been a bit difficult posing/moving the extremities like the arm and hand together when they are separate tools any suggestions on how you do this? I use transpose master a lot for this type of function since it lets me work on the whole model at once but I have had issues with the polygroups and the show/hide options when pressing Ctrl,Shift, LMB click it seems to let me only select and hide the first polygroup and then the next polygroup I select to hide it hides the rest of the model and not just that polygroup that no matter how many times I assign new polygroups that seems to happen. I know subtool master creates a new subtool but it seems to not like that feature very much so I end up doing a lot of masking. Have you seen or had that issue before?

[Callister]

Awesome man, yeah I also considered splitting the skull into different segments, but at that point Zbrush was already going really slow, and the geometry it would take to make those edges have the nice curves that they do would be insane, you could save a lot of time just using damien standard brush or something, unless you need to literally separate the geometry, which means you would need to model the inside of the skull aswell, I’ve had experience of this myself and It was really really time consuming. It would be awesome for you to do it by all means, but it will take a while I’m guessing. There’s a great resource of that here that’s a guy I worked with for a medical app called 3D4Medical, the seams in Zbrush had to be sorted out using a painstaking amount of time in 3DSMax, and several people ended up working on it, but it also doe’s look pretty awesome.

With the spine I looked at some MRI images and you’re probably right, about that, I must have thought they looked narrower because of the reference I had previously seen, so what you have there looks good.

Yeah I also used transpose master myself with several subtools, I’m guessing with the hiding polygroups situation you’re having you have more than two polygroups? I haven’t personally had that, sorry.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Callister

Thank you for the info and link. the skull looks pretty nice and I am sure it was a lot of work. I have a Neurosurgeon that works on my floor and has been critiquing my skeleton.
I keep him updated on my progress and the reason I want to split the skull is in hopes to secure a freelance project from him since he has shown an interest in my work.
This is part of the driving factor in diving into the complexity of the skull, on the flipside it is an achievement that I will like to know I have done. I enjoy the details in the work as long as I know what’s there.
I want to have clean and clear to read illustrations to show off, and when I need to do a project with the skeleton, I can start from a good base and spend the time I have tweaking and making the money shot.
The skull being split is one of the last main items that would take a considerable amount of time to complete so I prefer to do it now before I skip ahead too far.

I have been very very fortunate to have done several medical illustrations at my job. In the future I want to continue to grow in my art experience, and pay off that school loan.
While I am in the medical environment my main focus will be on medicine/medical illustrations at this time.
If you have oranges you make orange juice, or screwdrivers if you have something to mix with it.

As far as the polygroups go I did have more than two polygroups. Im not sure why it acted that way but I’ll check it in r7 and see if happens in that version at some time.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Keyshot render

[Daniel_Biggers]

I hate showing the image since it is in such a crude shape but I finally started splitting the skull and I am posting an image to prove it.
I tried unsuccessfully at polypainting the different sections on the whole model thinking I could just select those groups do a polygroups from poly paint
and separate them all that way. I did just that until for some reason even though there were separate polygroups for each section I wanted When I hit
ctrl LMB to select just that part to separate it into its own subtool it only recognized two polygroups??? Which means I wasted what I thought was a time saver since using the lasso select
for hiding the different portions of geometry I felt would have been difficult to do, but in the end that is exactly what I had to do, as well as using some masking and polygroups from mask features.
I did find a cool feature in the draw menu that allowed me to take my orthographic views and project them over the model …it also has a opacity to it and it looks like it is painted directly
on the model. I am not sure if I remember this correctly but can you project your XYZ views onto the model from within the draw menu? Ideally that would have been awesome to project all the color separations
do some cleanup and polygroups from polypaint and then select each polygroup separately hide the rest and split hidden. …sounds easy on paper I can see now I am going to have to do a lot of cleanup and create
some parts that were just not possible to get from the skull model from the way it was sculpted.

Wish me luck on this hill of hidden details.

[Daniel_Biggers]

I spent some time on the frontal bone and the frontal sinus. In retrospect I think I could have just waited till I need that in a project and saved some time for other stuff but its in there anyways, (still needs some tweaking).
Everything is a far way away from being done but at least the progress can be viewed. That being said feel free to comment if there are any items that seem so far off that they are just not right.

As always thank you for viewing the progress.

[Zachris_Pensar]

Hey! Looks like you’re on the right track! Don’t overthink the way to do things You do have to make many parts from scratch, and quickest is probably either to start with shadowbox or just a sphere and move>dynamesh>move>dynamesh etc… Looking forward to see more

[Daniel_Biggers]

Thank you for the encouraging words, and advice.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Latest update …its as far as I could get tonight.

[Daniel_Biggers]

Another one… Unfortunately when I did the Zremesher on the Frontal bone I forgot I had symmetry on and so when I made this screenshot I can see I have to move more stuff around so it is not symmetrical :P. I think I can project the info from the new old one onto the new in areas that I need but since there are holes for the frontal sinus I am not sure It will work out like I want. Also I am the only one that I see having this issue but Zbrush keeps crashing on me in the 64bit version, more than the 32 and both more than I can remember in any other version before 4R7. it usually seems random but I have noticed it when I try to append a subtool a lot.