EMBRYO
ANATOMY MANNEQUIN
Embryo is a project born in 2020 that can be considered the prosecution of previous anatomy studies. Its scope was to develop a tool for building the human figure in Digital Sculpting which led to the construction, in June 2022, of an anatomy mannequin, that can be modified in proportion, physiognomy, and pose.
The Embryo mannequin is an assembled group of simplified anatomical elements, that are linked together.
The simplified anatomical elements are objects composed of multiple meshes, that roughly represent bones, muscles, and fat.
In order to understand the mannequin's breakdown, the elements are shown in the images below with different colors.
The anatomical element can be of 3 types: bone, muscle-fat, and mixed.
The bone elements are similar to bones and consist in the key points that move the mannequin.
The muscle-fat elements are shapes that imitate the shape of muscles, fat, or a mix of both, and they move following the bone ones.
Finally, the mixed elements are a mix of bone elements and muscle-fat elements. Scapula, fingers, head, and mandible, can be considered mixed, all the others are bone or muscle-fat type.
The system works by moving, rotating, or scaling a portion of the body from key points, which are the bones that compose the articulations.
​
To make an example: in order to lift the arm parallel to the ground, it takes to select the upper margin of the humerus bone element and rotate it clockwise, from the front view.
Arms and legs' length can be changed, thanks to a traversal cut in two parts of their bone elements: humerus, radius-ulna, femur, and tibia-fibula.
If moved away longitudinally, the two components of the bone elements cause the length variation of the entire limb's portion.
This trick allows, in the case of the forearm, other than variation in length, also the rotation of the wrist.
The pictures show :
​
-
Arm and forearm's bone subdivision in two parts, marked with colors
- normal full arm
-
forearm stretch
-
wrist rotation
-
forearm and linked objects (hand) enlarged
1
2
3
4
5
Bone objects and muscle-fat objects are tied to each other by simple parenting links, and not with rigging techniques.
For this reason, the muscles-fat objects do not deform when the bone objects move, but just stiffly follow the movement of the ones, that they are related to.
In fact, in order to achieve coherent muscle deformations, it is necessary to modify the muscle-fat volumes after the move, with a digital sculpting brush.
The image below shows the pectoral object that is not following the arm lift and is being fixed later.
Only in four cases the objects behave elastically:
​
-
lumbar meshes
-
abdominal oblique meshes
-
sternocleidomastoid meshes
-
cervical meshes
1
2
3
4
These elastic meshes come from a single object, which is called the "stretching egg", that is specifically built for the scope. The stretching egg objects are able to shrink, relax, scale, and rotate from their extremities, thanks to apposite controllers, and once they are linked to the proper bone objects, behave like muscles.
The dorsal spine of Embryo is composed of 8 elements linked to each other, in this order: from the 1st to the 5th and from the 8th to the 6th, with the 5th and the 6th not reciprocally connected.
Related to the spine areas, the 8 elements are so organized: 1st and 2nd for the cervical vertebrae, 3rd, 4th, and 5th for the dorsal vertebrae, 6th, and 7th for the lumbar vertebrae, and 8 for the sacral vertebrae.
The workflow for creating a digital sculpt with Embryo, consists of these phases:
​
A) proportion settings
B) pose and deformation fixing
C) Further volumes refinements and material addition
D) Remesh all in one surface and finish in digital sculpting
A
B
C
D
By watching this video, which shows phases A and B, the principles here exposed will be much clear.
3D ART & DESIGN