What's your opinion on anatomy?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

Great Topic.

I think the relevance of anatomy varies with the type of art and age you live in and how you practice your art.
You need to know nothing about anatomy to be a good artist.

A sculptor from 500 years ago knew nothing about anatomy. He studied the his references by walking around it, touching it, he took it in.
He had a reference that had volume, shape and proportion and he was able to grasp and understand it by looking at it. He didn’t care that there are two dermal layers scattering light, what made the color of flesh, what names muscles had and where they where…
And depending on his fine senses and how skillful he was with his tool he made a stone into a piece of art.

Today most references we have are photographs, concept arts. A CG-Sculptor in the industry is no CG-artist per se. He’s a CG-manufacturer. There is no Lara Croft in the warehouse he can fetch and put in front of his desk and study for half a day.
But our Lara is made up of the same parts as any other human. Know the parts, you can reconstruct it.

A perfect example are all the horrible human heads in this forum (and there are quite a lot). The model from two dimensional references, front and side and can’t grasp the volume a head has. Knowing the shape of a skull, knowing where the cheekbone sits and understanding how the lower yaw really looks like could help them a lot. Or knowing how the teeth really sit in a skull… have you seen how many humanoid heads are in this forum where the models most likely would have to have all their teeth in one straight row? :slight_smile:

It’s arguable if proportion and volume is part of anatomy. Per definition maybe. The word itself comes from two greek words, one meaning open/enter, the other to cut/slice.

One thing is certain. An artist creating anything three dimensional has to have a good spatial ability and visual thinking.
If you have seen and taken in what you want to model/sculpt in real life, the anatomical knowledge is only a help not to forget details or kick up realism a notch, but it surely is not mandatory.

The other side is, well let’s take a nice example in this forum again:
My fingers aren’t enough to count the forum users here which are male, in their early teens wanting to get into organic human modelling.
For obvious reasons many choose to go after the female body and usually they create mutants. Why? I guess because most of them have never seen a women in all her natural beauty in front of their eyes, touched her, had enough time to really take the body in. They only know the female body from reference images, bikini magazines, or Television, and if you’re on the beach you don’t stare at women and if caught say “Sorry, I was just taking in your volume and natural magic…”, especially not as a teen :smiley:

And today with sculpting tools that adaptively change and allow volume, it’s easier than ever to sculpt without anatomical knowledge. You just have to create what you see. You do not need to know what’s underneath.

However, the “what you see” part has become difficult.

That’s why I wrote in the other thread how important I find manual retopo.
If you want to grasp the human body and don’t have one to take in, get a really good 3d model of one, for starters one from Makehuman is great. And then just look at it and start to retopo it. And where the edgeloops don’t come naturally to you, look in an anatomy book what might be under that bulky part below the shoulder on your back. And once you know that there is the scapula (bladebone) and you know it’s shape, you can lay the loop there easily.

Personally I think anatomical knowledge is not mandatory, but it will make you a better artist - and usually artistic curiosity gets you into anatomy anyways.

And xrg said it well, the problem is that people think of proportion as a “ruleset” like Anatomy.
I already made models from your average human female. The reaction? That the model is ugly. Why? Because in CG everyone expects the perfect proportions as a part of the Anatomy-ruleset.

22

someone who knows no anatomy will see 100 things someone who knows anatomy will see 1000. When I look at these guys I am seeing proportions, landmarks of the bones, how the bodies have moved so that the are balanced, the superficial muscles where the are originating from and what the are attaching to etc.

A lot of the old master went as far as dissecting bodies to understand what was going but luckily in this day and age you can buy a book or some plaster casts and not have to rob graves.

If you can’t name a muscle and say what its origin and insertion is than sorry you are deluding yourself because your knowledge on this subject is extremely shallow. I own a few anatomy books, Bridgeman, Pecks, Richer, Bammes this is not stuff that is brushed over.

Just watch a tutorial by someone like Ryan Kingslien or Scott Eaton and you will see the difference between people who know anatomy and those that don’t. These guys can look at a body and tell you what all those little bumps and bulges are. Fat, thin, tall, short or athlete we all have the same bones and same muscles the might be shaped differently or covered by fat but the are there.

23

Another page from you, anexma
But, I agree with all you said.

Let me put it this way.
In the ancient world, artists where touching the human body. In renaissance, they became very shy for well known reasons. So, they invented anatomy. What about the 21 century then? I agree anexma, you have a point here.
BTW, the word anatomy is greek, you gave the right etymology. However, such greek terms will not be found in the classical greek literature. Such terms -words invented in the european world. Even Isaac Newton wrote some interesting books in a perfect greek language. Most of other books in latin.
I mean, greek sculptors like Phidias created masterpieces, from an anatomical perspective they look perfect. I doubt if he ever heard the word anatomy. Ancient rumors find him in a dark room, holding a candle and watching how the light flows on the shapes of a human body.
The hilarious photo in my first post. It presents what is usually happening, when anatomy becomes a decoration of a rather bad drawing.

@tyrant

someone who knows no anatomy will see 100 things someone who knows anatomy will see 1000

I prefer to see 10 than 1000. Mostly, because I have to measure them. With precision.

Just watch a tutorial by someone like Ryan Kingslien or Scott Eaton and you will see the difference between people who know anatomy and those that don’t.

But, I do avoid these books, I do prefer some other references.
These people are great on noticing what’s wrong on a study. Never what’s right. LOL
Tyrant, I love your studies - sketches. But for a quite different reason. For their abstraction. Because you wrote down what you understand only. How you understand it. That’s the most important to me.

24

@tyrant

What I actually meant was, people will state things such as “Humans are x heads high” as a hard fact, rather than realizing it’s actually a guideline. Look at those two, one appears to be 7 heads high, the other 6. Granted Manute Bol (the tall guy) is an extreme case, but everyone has variations away from the average proportions. Otherwise we’d all look identical.

Some art students believe the average is gospel and will try to retrofit actual models “imperfections” to fit them. They’re drawing what they know rather than what they see.

I can’t name hardly any of them. I have a few Hogarth books, and some Loomis PDFs, but hardly ever do studies. Let’s have an anatomy drawing competition; you need to get out of your procrastination rut anyway. :stuck_out_tongue:

25

I’m kinda lost on what this topic is about, anatomy versus form? Anatomy versus refrrence?

I guess, for me the most important reason to learn anatomy is to teach someone the body isn’t shaped arbitrarily, and the relation between autonomy and anatomy. Because if you don’t care for that you can just do with form and refference.

Ancient Greek artists may have understood the surface of the body very well, but I wonder if they appreciated unperfect form? You see many sculpts of the socalled ‘ugly people’ in 3d art, the old people, the ones with funny noses, etc, but we can agree we can appreciate their faces and the attempt and trying to understand the underlying logic.

Edit: I’ll join you in your anatomy binge, my comprehension of the legs and back area need polishing.

26

I think there is much interest in anatomy. However, the average person lacks the motivation to devote time to learning and working. Like any kind of knowledge worth understanding, it takes real effort to get this kind of knowledge and apply it practically. It is work.

I also don’t expect beginning artists to produce masterpieces right away. I paint in oils, but I don’t usually show people my incomplete projects and failures. I don’t consider myself a master by any means, but I have painted a few portraits to completion that turned out reasonably well. It took a lot of patience and work.

Drawing and painting teaches the artist that the names we give to things are only useful to a point. Tell someone to draw an eye, and you’ll likely get a symbol of an eye rather than an actual rendering of a spherical structure enclosed by skin, bone, and muscle. Anatomical language defining structures can aid an artist to see, and by seeing an artist can create based on what is known.

27

Great discussion here…
My first post was my general view of anatomy as being not separate from the whole person. The post about seeing and touching volume in the real world or how light flows over the surface of external muscles was very good. A number of teaching artist, have said if you have to sell your soul to the Devil, take life drawing classes. I know my work would improve with such observations.

Michalis is the person who encouraged me to do non-symmetrical sculpting and sculpt a pose in place. That helps too in understanding human form. Now do not take me as one must sculpt only non-symmetrical but in our quest to see human form better it forces us away from the computer’s help and to the use of our own efforts.

Also take a block of digital clay, sculpting and cutting away at it like it’s marble. My attempt was a complete and utter failure. What does that revel, my weakness of understanding how to create human form… I will try again

28

Ancient Greek artists may have understood the surface of the body very well, but I wonder if they appreciated unperfect form? You see many sculpts of the socalled ‘ugly people’ in 3d art, the old people, the ones with funny noses, etc, but we can agree we can appreciate their faces and the attempt and trying to understand the underlying logic.

Sometimes, see the satyr with aphrodite. But such faces start appearing in hellenistic and grecoroman period.
Roman portraiture may be the first time in the history of art, when we start seeing real human faces. Individuality then.
Though not as powerful as those of the classical golden age, they still are wonderful portraits and a first class reference. Ugly people, beautiful people. Reality.

hey David, welcome to our corner bar.
Symmetry… he he
Well, you can’t sculpt an anatomical study with symmetry on. OK for a portrait (easy to brake sym after) but for a nude, a body? I doubt it. It will start looking like the two hilarious guys in the photo.
Of course there’re well known reasons for T poses, low poly meshes and baked bumps-nmaps.
May I say… isn’t this procedure epidermic? What’s happening? anatomy supposed to be the opposite.
Another one, food for discussion.
Dynamic topology, dyn tessellation, voxels etc, vs a multires sculpting system.
What is multires if not an epidermic displacement? (even SSS reacts differently on multires, have you notice it?)

Don’t take me wrong, I have nothing against anatomy, nothing against knowledge. But is it enough? What about the forrest behind the tree?

29

there is not a single professional/well respected artist who has said anatomy alone is enough.

so I have no clue why you are even making that implication.

If that was the case,doctor/surgeons would be amazing figure artists.

30

As in everything,you can be more instinctive or you can be well aware.
You can play guitar or piano by ear or you can study harmony and scales,it’s depend on how you approach the life.
Personally I think that if you really are interested in a particular art, or simply to a job(as computer graphics can’t be really called “art” for now) it’s better to know everything about the subject,the more you know,more choices you can do,the more freedom you have.

31

Anatomy. Its another thing than giving names to parts of the body, distinguish them and describing their function?

If I asked somewhere how to improve my knowledge of the figure, I get answers like: buy Bridgman books. One day I wrote to Greg Hildebrandt, asking for advice. Not himself, but his secretary answered:
“Loomis, Loomis, Loomis!” In her opinion, Greg gave that answer to anyone asking him for advice.

Well, I have a bunch of books here. Bridgman, a collection of Loomis PDF’s, 2 Bammes books, and some others. Worked with them, its interesting but I still have problems to gasp the form itself. Naming bones and muscles, describing their function, it might be a part but there lacks something important. I start having doubts to be on the right path.
But, asking people, I regulary get the advice to buy something, a book or (brrrrh) a highly expensive DVD collection. Pushing me back to a path which does not work for me as well.

To grow I need to see. Nowdays, people do not walk naked through streets, they have cloth, hiding their forms. Drawing naked people on the open-air-bath, might be a solution. There I can see and draw people. But, it does not last long, someone warned me not to do so. He spoke about it as if it is something criminal. As if someone doing it should be put into psychiatry or prison to keep “society” safe from those unwanted eyes.

There are photographs, there are special reference sides which help an artist to save time (not loosing weeks looking for good refs in the internet). But they are 2D, and disturbed by camera projection. 2D to 3D does not work in my mind as well, I need true 3D figures. Of course, I can achieve something using different views of the same thing, but it is not really relaxing for me, and I am seldom content with the result.

I drew a lot. Trees, buildings, sculptures, little still-lifes … some paintings. “You have to draw a lot”, a common slogan one hears if one likes to understand how to draw figure. I did, still, there lacks something. Drawing trees I wont develop further figural knowledge.

It is about finding a fruitful path, about growing in figurative arts.
Where to start? Where is the 3D figure, how to study it? A good way for someone who does not have ten-thousands to study on the Angel Academy of Arts (Florence)?
I am not sure, books will bring me further.

In Berlin, I have had opportunity to draw from ancient greek sculptures. For some weeks I did. Suddenly, I was able to construct figure from mind. I got some independence, I felt I did an important step, as if I am getting to a next level. That was “holiday” time. Went back home. No figural arts I can study from. Sculptures in Bielefeld, rather cubes, abstract forms. Some aesthetics, nothing useful to study figure. After some months I lost my ability to draw figure from mind.

Here in Leipzig there is a collection of ancient greek sculptures.
In Leipzig, there are also some figural artists I like a lot (Michael Triegel). There is the reason I moved to Leipzig. I looked for a place traditional art is practiced. An alternative to an art which tries to be “alternative” at all cost. Searching for artists who practice aesthetics.

As I contacted the one who managed the collection of ancient sculptures: its not public. I am not allowed to enter. The few artists I wrote to never answered. So, I am in leipzig now, but I could also be on the moon, or on Mars.

Thats probably how I loose most time. I cannot focus my strength to study figure itself, but I have to create an environment where I can study figure, without any in-depth access to the figure itself (beside myself; as I said, photographs do not work well for me). Now there isnt much strength left.
Probably, I need a strenghtening advice of a master I can trust. If I lost hope, the path went out of my eyes, his confidence will lead me back to it.

32

@Siebeneicher
Many many thank you for your participation.
That’s a nice post, really nice!
So true.

1 Like
33

Well, in almost every single sculpting tutorial I have watched the teacher always talks about the importance of anatomy. If you have a working knowledge of anatomy you can create lifelike humans and even alien creatures. If you don’t have that knowledge it will show in your models.

34

There are really no nude figure drawing workshops in Leipzig?
When you ask people how to strenghten your artistic understanding of anatomy, I think it’s kinda implied that you do regular figure drawing and learn from those recommended books.
Unless it’s the wrong Leipzig, or the information is off by years, this looks pretty promising http://www.muehlstrasse.de/aktzeichnen.html

35

You can try these (NSFW… obviously). Models you can rotate around.

Other reference link I have:
Anatomy for Sculptors
Proko
Babe Lab
Drawsh

You can learn from photographs, but it just takes some effort to avoid going into “Xerox mode” where you’re just duplicating the photo rather than analyzing forms. Some ways to avoid that are to try to draw a mirror image of the reference, or even trying to draw the figure rotated 45 degrees from what is shown.

36

Anatomy is an ambiguous term because each artistic style has it’s own style and that defines a genre (e.g. classic art, anime, cartoon, comics, abstract, surreal, pop art, etc). In scientific terms anatomy is the study of physiology of beings (any creature that is living and moving) and is no accident that if you want to achieve life-likeness and realism you need to know good anatomy.

In this following image you can see that there is a model that is not realistic, and then you see a sculpt that is realistic. The key difference -apart that the sculpt misses a skin- is that our human brains are better fond of the sculpt to conceive it as life-like, but the poor model on the left is quickly filtered as not realistic and looks fake.

human faces comparison.jpg735×320 44.7 KB

The key of art is to create illusions, and realistic art means realistic illusions. :slight_smile:

37

The key of art is to create illusions, and realistic art means realistic illusions.

A good one. +1
I would like to comment the left head though, the topology.
On the forehead area. This, anatomically speaking, is a very dense area. Lot of tension there.
You possible have noticed, in photo realistic animations, how self-consious animators become.
Obviously, they don’t have much to animate there. Though, in nature, in anatomy if you like, too many, too complicated elements there.
Then, still commenting this topology, there’s a basic volume, a sphere like, including half of the nose, mouth and chin. This needs a clean loop around, possibly two loops.
I could keep saying…
But you see my point? It’s not about anatomy, not about details. It’s about topology. It’s about the basics. Everything constructed like spheres, cylinders, cubes etc. A system we can control, measure.

On the right, we have some study on anatomy which is for the birds. Do you see why?
Because there isn’t any intention from the artist to compose a believable solution of shapes. He just adds what he knows but not what he sees or touches. He lost the basic geometry as well. Good for monsters or extra terrestrials. Anyway, this is not a mouth. It’s wrong.

BTW, Anatomy for Sculptors is a good site. Blocking anatomy is the most interesting part.

38

The few post about our lack of seeing human form, that is the nude in the real world revels to me at least the source of most of our struggles. Trees are everywhere, birds, cars, buildings and the list could go on and on. We have music everywhere, ipods, phones, radio, TV and Concerts of all types of music. No wonder there is no lack of musical artist but where is the sculpter?. We were not surrounded by nudity growing up for the most of us. The body being hidden as stated before. So is it a wonder that we struggle with human form only seeing the shadow of the real thing, in nude pictures or on the street ,a few expose legs, arms and heads. There are more portrait artist today than ever, the head is the most exposed part of our human body in at least western society.

Now to Michalis comment’s about spheres, cylinders and cubes or wedges. Bruce Hogarth, book Dynamic Figure Drawing, revised additon goes into detail about this. Construction of the body from geometrical shapes. He also goes further in that he give his steps in the order of construction, First the torso which includes the pelvis as everthing hangs on that. Next the legs, then arms and finally the head. Hogarth’s general idea of figure drawing in his thinking is building form more like a sculpter than lines… Hogarth’s way of topology, control and measure that michalis was talking about.

39

Shapes(basic forms) and anatomy are 2 different things,but they work together .
The anatomy helps understanding the internal structure,what you can see(or cannot see,it depends on the kind of postures you have),most important it helps reconstruncting poses if you need to.
The shapes actually have nothing to do with how things works and are only the visual result,it’s a simplification(abstraction).
The good thing about shapes is that they are a much better synthesis of a complex form,where anatomy is more an analitic representation of how things really work,it’s a deeper and more atomic level of visualization.
Another little example from music(computer music this time),shapes are like sound synthesis where anatomy is like sampled sounds(or physical modelled synthesis).
A good artist should simplify the complex form with shapes and use anatomy to give tension and relaxation when he needs,remembering that the body it’s not only muscles,but also fat an bones(the most common error is to give everywhere and always tension to muscles,where the major part of the time what you see is only the synthesis of the different tissues layered)

40

The sculptor is in architecture and cars and household items. The world in general has never been as Media rich as it has ever been today.

We were not surrounded by nudity growing up for the most of us. The body hidden being as stated before. So is it a wonder that we struggle with human form only seeing the shadow of the real thing, in nude pictures or on the street ,a few expose legs, arms and heads. There are more portrait artist today than ever, the head is the most exposed part of our human body in at least western society.

Actually, there’s more portrait artists than ever, because the face is the most important communication point for us, thus the first thing we want to learn to draw. There’s always been more portrait artists in the world than others.

I have quite some experience with amateur comic makers and people who are really into the Manga aesthetic.The first thing you learn from those how to draw books is how to draw a face. Because these how-to-draw books are made by utter hacks, they somehow can’t describe the hands or any other part of the body in a similar way, leading to the amateur manga artist to see the hand as difficult and tricky.(That it deforms more than the face doesn’t help either). Similarly, many of them claim that backgrounds are difficult(they’re not, they’re super fun). Because the basic handling of a face is handed to people on a silver platter they are more willing to devote their time to getting into the complicate of it, but hands and feet are considered to be this thing you try for a bit and are happy to be done with it.

Also, the study of Anatomy started around late Ancient times by a Roman military doctor. Late Ancient times and Medieval times still had the relative lack of shame, and it wasn’t till late Medieval times people started really covering themselves up, so the notion that Anatomy was required because we started covering ourselves up more might be a bit generalistic.