3D Anatomy Tool (Student Project)
Hi Polycount,
I thought I'd start this thread to keep you all up to date on my final year project. I'm developing an interactive 3D human anatomy tool that will focus on providing a reference for artists. I'll be sculpting the skin, muscles an bones of the male body in ZBrush and developing the tool in the wonderful UE4.
Here's some of my progress so far, i'll post more as I go.
If this all sounds like your kind of thing I'd really appreciate your response to this questionnaire. Your feedback will help me to create a better tool and also do me a massive favor when I come to writing up my dissertation to go alongside it. Go on, you know you want to help me out.
Thanks,
Mark
I thought I'd start this thread to keep you all up to date on my final year project. I'm developing an interactive 3D human anatomy tool that will focus on providing a reference for artists. I'll be sculpting the skin, muscles an bones of the male body in ZBrush and developing the tool in the wonderful UE4.
Here's some of my progress so far, i'll post more as I go.
If this all sounds like your kind of thing I'd really appreciate your response to this questionnaire. Your feedback will help me to create a better tool and also do me a massive favor when I come to writing up my dissertation to go alongside it. Go on, you know you want to help me out.
Thanks,
Mark
Replies
Frankly, if you're gonna do it by hand(skin, muscles, bones) you need to know your stuff to perfection. Otherwise, I don't see a reason. If you have access to 3d scanning, you should use that for whatever you can.
There already exist many interactive 3d anatomy systems out there, some of them are really good. You're gonna need to make something better to convince us to use your's.
I'm using 3d scan data as a reference for my work, but i'll be modelling it all myself from scratch to create cleaner and more optimised geometry. This project is also a really good platform for me to improve on my own sculpting and anatomy skills.
I agree there are some great tools around, although few are focused on artistic form and hopefully that is where mine will excel.
Unfortunately the model will be static, I think dynamic bone and muscle systems are a bit out of the scope for this project. Although I agree it'd be great if I could add more poses in the future, I have more than enough to do at the moment. The tool will be interactive though, I hope to give the user a lot of controls and options. I'll be prioritising features that are popular in the survey results.
I blocked some of it out in maya but did the majority of the work in ZBrush.
All of this is still very much a work in progress, so if there are any areas in particular you think need more work please just let me know where to focus.
The skull was done using a lot of references including 3d scan data, here's a comparison.
I realise that the final piece will need to be very accurate to meet my aim for this project. But at the same time please bare in mind that this is student work, I'm still relatively new to ZBrush. I chose to do this project to challenge myself and to improve my skills, I'm still learning as I go. So if you do have any advice or more specific feedback that'd be really helpful and much appreciated.
Cheers,
Mark
Your Humerus is oriented wrong and because of that Ulna and Radius are also wrong. They don't cross each other like that.
Also ribs are attached to Sternum with cartilage tissue. It's not a single solid bone structure.
For advice: Expect to spend a lot of time on this. Take one bone at a time instead of rushing to get the whole body ready. The human body is very complex.
Patience!
Zygote body is a great resource that I have been using. I couldn't use it much for the arm though as I chose a different stance. I'll make sure to find more references and look back over that section in particular. I agree that it needs more work, so thanks for pointing it out.
I don't want to rush through this at all and I know it will take a lot of time to get right. However as this is for my final year project I have to keep my deadline in mind. Now that I have the skeleton blocked out I am refining it one section at a time and adding muscles as I go. I'll probably post some progress in the next few days or so.
Also thanks to everyone who has already answered my questionnaire! I've got almost 40 responses which will definitely help me with the direction of this project and my dissertation. I'll probably close it next week, so please check it out before then if you haven't already.
Cheers!
You need to look at a lot of actual scans with better quality than your skull if you want to improve this considerably. Otherwise all errors, blurry parts, errors in other source material and interpretation errors by you will all accumulate in your version.
One obvious example are the eyeballs, which seem quite large right now. Imagine what that means for finer and more complicated detail.
Harshly put, any interpretation introduced by you at your current level of experience has a good chance of being wrong.
When it comes to accuracy nothing is really going to beat a 3D scan at the end of the day and the new tool from Ten 24 looks really cool. I'm not trying to compete with this as I've explained I'm just creating this for my own educational purposes. Hopefully the final tool will be strong enough to help some artists out, although many of you are at much higher level than I'll be able to achieve by then.
Here's my latest anatomy progress. Any suggestions/improvements would be really appreciated. Thanks!
Anatomy WIP: http://i.imgur.com/BJGOzNT.jpg
Image: http://i.imgur.com/UU6MiLB.jpg
[SKETCHFAB]d2d9086d12e34f0f9131df86eb70214c[/SKETCHFAB]
Still lots of features i'd like to add. I've got two assignments due in the next two weeks though so that will probably take up the bulk of my time. But i'll keep going with this whenever I get a spare moment.
My worry here is that you're presenting something that people will potentially use for their own reference in future, and to be blunt, you're just not good enough for that yet.
The application itself looks really cool, i would pursue/push that agenda quite heavily. But i would also find an actual expert to make the reference material, because (and i sincerely believe that in 6 months or a year for now you'll look on this and agree with me) your work as it stands right now is more likely to harm the growth of people who don't know better, than help anybody.
My final year project had to involve the development of a tool so I chose this as a way of incorporating sculpting in to my work so that I could practice. I'm proud of how far I have come and I'm looking forward to improving further. Please let me know if you have any general feedback or advice, I'll be sure to take it on board.
[EDIT: Changed thread title to include Student Project]
I'm now writing up my dissertation and would really appreciate any responses to my survey.
Thanks for your guidance and I hope that you like my project.
It would've been cool if I had done it as the anatomy of a game character and actually designed my own stylised character with anatomy such as this. That's certainly something i'd like to try out in the future.
I did a similar project as a student and found it really rewarding. Keep going, it's a great way to learn anatomy!