Incredibly Lifelike Anatomical Study Using ZBrush

A very lifelike 3D piece, by character designer Adam Skutt. He created it using ZBrush and rendered it in Mental Ray for Maya. Reminds me of the 3D Dissection of Neck by Tsvetomir Georgiev that I posted many many years ago on Street Anatomy.

I'm in awe of the 3D process for getting an image like the one above. The time and research Adam put into this definitely shows. Below he shares his process for creating the image. Definitely useful for those of you learning 3D and ZBrush!

"The creation of this was done completely within Zbrush, aside from the cloth which was a MD sim. Using a sphere and dynamesh I started with the skull and then the jaw. Then, I started layering muscles on the face using the same method, using dynamesh and s sphere. I didn't like how the muscles looked so detached from the bones and from each other, so everyone once in a while I would re-dynamesh everything together again—so in essence the skull and muscles of the face became one subtool that I could sculpt on. I used the same methods with the sternum, clavicle and pec[toral] muscles. The veins and nerves were simply done zpheres, I tried other techniques as well but I felt I got the most accurate results with the zpheres...the most time consuming part was not the modeling but the reference hunting and checking, and re-checking over and over again to ensure I could get the most accurate results possible. Another positive side effect of this study was that I could tie it in with work and understanding FACS and how facial muscles work together. If people show interest I could upload this to gumroad and sell it for a small fee - IM me about this.

I rendered in Mental Ray for Maya. It was a pretty straight forward environment setup, I used curved ramp as backdrop and added some sidewalls to bounce light. I setup 4 lights—a couple rim lights a key and a fill. They were all area lights using light shape and a mental ray physical light shader, using the HSV value for intensity. For the camera I used a mia photographic lens and tweaked the settings along with light intensity until everything looked decent." 

View more of Adam's work on his ZBrushCentral portfolio!