Hi all,
Has anyone bought Anatomy for 3d Artists? Is it worth the price?
It’s R749 in my country (about $42)
I recently saw this video and the clean layout of the book is really attractive.
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heck yeah!
Is it worth it depends entirely on if you need it 
as a book, it’s a good book, is it worth spending money on? Depends on your anatomy knowledge, I suppose, which only you can know for sure.
You should also check ThriftBooks, I almost promise you can find it for a third or less of that price
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They’ve flipped through every page. Although you can’t really read the text well, the images should give you some idea how useful it will be to you. I know I want it, but haven’t decided if I want it for $45 (I still reference my 2D drawing books). If this is by the same people who did Anatomy for Sculptors they have a number of excerpts from that series on their artstation: https://www.artstation.com/anatomy4sculptors (if it’s not the same people, still go check out that artstation, I think you’ll like it given your interest in anatomy. They’ve uploaded a lot of really good reference)
@joseph Sadly, Anatomy for 3D artists is $42 on ThriftBooks.
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I have very little knowledge of anatomy, i own a copy of ‘Atlas of human anatomy for the artist’ by Stephen Rogers Peck but the book goes into depth pretty fast. I like to develop surface knowledge first, kind of like Syntax before delving in deeper.
Thanks for the link, not the same people but i also saw their book when i was browsing for something to buy.
I have a hard time wrapping by head around Anatomy, it almost feels like learning OOP. Maybe i am just bad with abstract thinking.
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No, definitely not. Anatomy is just hard, it’s not you, and you are not alone in struggling with it. It’s why everyone’s first character looks terrible, and why industry professionals constantly talk about the importance of reference. It’s likely why that book hasn’t depreciated in value on ThriftBooks as well. Artists don’t part with their GOOD reference material.
Ugly first characters are a rite of passage for character artists - and it’s the anatomy that trips people up. A lot of what goes into making a character look right is anatomically very finicky. Below are two attempts at similarly proportioned characters, my first two years ago and a more recent model.
Even though the primary proportions and shapes are roughly the similar (except the jaw), one looks distinctly less human than the other because all those subtle, finicky secondary details are what actually makes it work, and a big part of learning anatomy is trying to do it and learning what you don’t know (and fixing it with reference): like where the convex and concave surfaces are and how deep, how round and how sharp different areas should be, what angle, how thick/thing is this part or that part, blah blah blah.
I could tell the first one was wrong, but at the time I had no idea how exactly to fix it.
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It looks like it has some decent information, you could also look at Loomis anatomy book or some Proko videos. Good anatomy knowledge is need universally for artist who make characters.