Reply To: Suggestions for new courses

[Kent Trammell]

“the teres major inserts onto the humerus from the base of the scapula” is much more descriptive and evocative for your brain than “there’s kind of a bulge here,”

There is a difference if you know that it’s “latissimus dorsi” or “serratus anterior”, rather than “that big muscle on the back” and “that fan-shaped thing, that is mistaken for ribs”.

I feel its important to learn anatomy by their proper names. It helps differentiating the parts which makes stuff easier to remember.

First of all I completely agree with you. The main reason I think the names are important for communication: Teacher communicating to student, student researching body parts for themselves, artist to art director, etc.

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Second, this is precisely why I’ve avoided doing a focused anatomy course. As an artist, I have never needed to learn the proper names to be able to form an anatomically correct/believable human body. Instead I learned that all the information you need is embedded in photographs/illustrations and the ability to interpret lighting and shading into 3d form. And as a bonus, visual interpretation works for every kind of modeling beyond anatomy.

However when I started teaching human body modeling/sculpting I realized it’s terribly inefficient to describe the human body without knowing the proper terms. But have you ever tried to learn anatomy from googling and youtube videos? 1) The names are in a different language and you’re never sure if you’re pronouncing them correctly, which is a major backfire perceptually to know anatomy names but pronounce them wrong. 2) Similar diagrams will point to seemingly the same area with a different name. So you never really know which is the right anatomical name. And there’s hundreds of anatomical terms to sift through in this way. 

We all know that there’s a ton of foreign and uncommon terms to use in order to interact with computer graphics: Fresnel, refraction, dielectrics, retopology, vignette, chromatic aberration, diffuse, and on and on. But the volume of anatomical terminology combined with being in a different language makes the learning curve particularly steep – And the benefit is ONLY to inform human characters. To achieve this I would have to do an exhausting amount of research, video watching, and cross-referencing to develop a reliable list of terms. Then I’d have to make flash cards to commit them to memory. And all that effort just to communicate anatomy efficiently, doing very little it terms of actually forming the shapes themselves..

Usually people point to Ryan Kingslien as the standard for anatomy sculpting education. And it’s well deserved because his stuff is as good as it gets. But when you google Mr. Kingslien you’ll find that he’s entirely attached to human anatomy. It’s his whole career. So it makes perfect sense for him to know anatomy terms and spout it proudly because it’s all he outputs. You don’t go to him for advanced shader creation or cloth simulation or how to create a short film, animation, or photorealistic environment creation.

I’ve always known that human anatomy/characters is one small piece of the broader CG journey; it’s never going to be enough for me to only do that and I expect most of you are in the same boat. All the more lowering our collective need to learn and store such terminology.
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I hope you don’t mind the transparent venting…You guys are completely justified to ask for an anatomy course that’s competently commentated with comprehensive terminology. (How about that alliteration?) And I’m not saying that I won’t scrape together the determination to accomplish what I just vented about. But please understand that you’re asking for a tremendous effort compared to other courses. I know the demand is high and I’ve been actively pondering the prospect for years. I think ideally I will be able to create a course or workshop (or both) that’s supported by competent anatomical terminology but is also true to myself in shedding light that the benefit is very limited for actual shape creation.

Wow, that turned out to be a lot. Thanks for listening ☺️