Human Muscle Animation

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Well, I have hesitated to open a new thread here for a long time but now I want to show you the work I’ve been doing for the last months.

This is my work for school, for a kind of ‘A levels’, the German ‘Abitur’. (also meine Facharbeit)
I’m doing this for art class and it’s the first thing I have created in 3D so far.

It was a hard start with human topology and then shape keys
but thanks to toloban (well known here on blenderartists), a lot of cool tutorials from the blender community and also good advice by the nice german forum blendpolis.org, I finally managed it to come so far.

The presentation of the model is not very good, I know, but I couldn’t take care of everything. I want to create textures and a better visualization in the near future and also a better skin shader but there’s still a lot to do on the shape keys.

This movie is a turnaround, I was tired of all the stills that show only a part of the model.
As it’s WIP, please tell me your thoughts, thank you.

Turnaround_01 - file format:avi (1.87MB) - right click to download

edit: okay, here are three stills of the man
klick
klack
kluck

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deine erste Arbeit in Blender? wow, sieht gut aus! In welchem Fach schreibste Facharbeit?

Your first attempt at blending? wow, looks great? Which class did you make it for?

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Thanks wildchild! Let’s write in English here :wink:
(As already said) I have done it for art class.

It’s a bit bad I have only started the arm raising shape key so far…

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uh, i somehow read over the ‘art class’-line … sorry =)

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Good modeling. There are some strange shadow rising from the shoulder up the neck when he lifts his arm though. You might wanna check that out.

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@wildchild: no problem :smiley:

@tef: Thanks!
I am not very good at light setting so this is just the shadow from the raising arm…

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oh, it is? it allmost looks like the skin is vobbles… Well. For character light I would use the 3 point light system. U can find more about that and some more in this article.

http://www.frankwbaker.com/visual_storytelling_through_lighting.htm

Edit: I can see it is a shadow now :slight_smile: and I think ur lightning looks good so far.

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Thank you, tef!
The article is very good (but also very long ;))
and I think I have to rework my lighting system.

Right now I’m getting some issues with adding more shape keys to my model… :frowning:

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Awesome modelling for a first 3d work !

so you’re doing the mesh deformation / animation with shape keys ? Did you consider
to use a armature system? Might be way more flexible and you could use actions and
blenders NLA for animation…

If you could post a front view (ortho) of the character, it would be easier to comment
on the proportions.

Cool work!
def

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Thanks defstone!

Of course there is already a rig built in,
I have added a picture in the attachment.

edit: the head looks a bit small here, but it should be right (the bone makes it look smaller). We had a great discussion about the proportions on the blendpolis-forum and i won’t change it anymore

Attachments

render_wire_0102.jpg1024×768 78.7 KB

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a new one, not yet done

Stretching arm

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I guess since you have tasted crazy space, you realize there is a lot of hard work ahead of you pushing vertices for those shape keys.

You could rise the collar bone as well when the arm rises in your animation for a more realistic movement. The polygons on the back are not moving at all and that looks very strange, you might want to focus on them too.

This little animation was posted in the Makehuman forum, I don’t know if the clavicle and scapula actually rotate that much, but the animation is great to show the point:
http://www.dedalo-3d.com/public/forum/index.php?a=topic&topic=1167994786_15

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Great work neablo. Keep on going!
…and yes as tolobán already says, crazy space can be a real pain…
been there done that.

How do you handle movement on 2 axis with shapekeys? pydrivers or extra bones or something else?