is it necessary to learn anatomy for just character modelling not designing?

osama9595

so i have a simple question..iam not planing to design anything basically iam focusing on modelling existing elaborate 2d references so iam not designing anything 
so will it still be mandotory to learn anatomy in my case? or is it just necessary if someone is going to design their own character? 

FourtyNights

Anatomy is always mandatory for both 2D and 3D, when dealing with character art. Simple as that. No matter what the character is going to wear design-wise, there's always the underlying structure of anatomy under clothes.

Especially with 3D art you can't cheat with bad anatomy, with the mindset "I'll just sculpt mediocre body anatomy and focus only on visible anatomical parts (such as a head and/or hands, for example), because I can fix things with clothing later on". The answer is no.

1. Sculpting all clothing by hand in ZBrush -> That still needs a pretty solid and polished nude body under clothes. You can still simplify certain things with anatomy if the body is mostly covered by clothing and never seen in the game. I mean by that, cutting corners by not adding tertiary details for the body. But as long as the character is having properly sculpted secondary shapes and a little bit beyond that, you're good to go.

2. Simulating all clothing in Marvelous Designer (and refining in ZBrush, because it's pretty much unavoidable, since results of simulations in MD are never perfect out of the box) -> The importance of anatomy is even greater than with a previous 1. method, because the clothing is simulated physically correct on top of your anatomy sculpt, and possible anatomy mistakes can be seen through the simulated clothing, especially when clothes are more or less tight. So, when dealing with MD, make sure your anatomy is as refined to the top as possible.

3. Using high poly clothing assets via 3D scanning/photogrammetry. This is probably the only way to "cheat" with anatomy, since those clothes are scanned from a real person wearing them, so the anatomy is 100% correct, and you don't necessarily need to sculpt the whole body, but just visible anatomical parts of the body. Still as always, 3D scans aren't perfect either, they'll need clean-ups and improvements by an artist. So there's a chance to mess up with anatomy if you're not careful enough and try to be loyal to the original shapes of a raw scan result.

4. This fourth one isn't a "method" per se. But if your character is about to wear multiple changeable clothes... and you could strip them to underwears, or even nude... you better make your anatomy perfect, all the way to tertiary (micro) details!

5. The last advice: Start studying anatomy seriously, and create as many full nude character bases for your character projects. No matter what they're wearing at the end of the pipeline of yours, it's a valuable skill and knowledge to have, to keep yourself future proof... and just being a respected character artist among other character artists.

6. If you're starting to have a nice library of nude male and female bodies stored to your HDD, you can even re-use them to simulate new clothing for other characters, and so on. So many benefits to sculpt fully nude bases.

musashidan

@FourtyNights has pretty much summed it up. The short answer is yes. If you're serious about character art then anatomy knowledge and ability to apply it is essential. Don't be lazy. Learn it.

oglu

im doing chars now for 18 years... and i have to go back to learn anatomy a second time... my lack of understanding the underlying bone structure is holding me back... without anatomy its near impossible todo decent chars...

osama9595

thank you guys for the info 
i guess i will just stick to hard surface modeling,it's not about being lazy it's just that i don't have the qualities 
so i thought if iam not going to design anything only model already detailed 2d references and just convert them to 3d,it wouldn't require me to know anatomy as i would be just following the 2d concept

JordanN

osama9595 said:

thank you guys for the info 
i guess i will just stick to hard surface modeling,it's not about being lazy it's just that i don't have the qualities 
so i thought if iam not going to design anything only model already detailed 2d references and just convert them to 3d,it wouldn't require me to know anatomy as i would be just following the 2d concept

I'm a hardsurface artist but I've been practicing/learning anatomy on the side.

It's not actually that hard. When people speak of anatomy, they're referring to modeling characters that are grounded in reality. 

And even compared to Hardsurface modeling, I feel like the principles that guide Character modeling are interchangable. If you've ever made a Car or Weapon, just having a reference is not enough. You still pay close to attention to proportions, perspective, functionality etc.

With characters, you also have to remember where do muscles go, skull shape, phenotype differences, bone mass etc.

And there are countless resources out there anyway. I still have an Andrew Loomis textbook I bought a few years back and I rarely needed much more than that to understand characters.

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

osama9595 said:
i guess i will just stick to hard surface modeling,it's not about being lazy it's just that i don't have the qualities

Not with that attitude

I don't believe any knowledge of anatomy comes inherent to anyone, except certain body parts they're acutely interested in.

If you put effort in, you will learn. Hard surface modeling has its own bag of rules and relationships you'll have to learn if you go down that road.

I think the easiest way in life is to work on stuff that you enjoy doing and that you know there's a market for. The market demands both hardsurface and organic oriented artists. Which one gets you excited to roll out of bed in the morning and work? That's the real quality to be mindful of.

Alex_J

Condensed : 

No matter what genre of modeling you go for, you'll always have to continually learn new things, especially boring things you don't care about. That's just the way it is.

lotet

osama9595 said:

thank you guys for the info 
i guess i will just stick to hard surface modeling,it's not about being lazy it's just that i don't have the qualities 
so i thought if iam not going to design anything only model already detailed 2d references and just convert them to 3d,it wouldn't require me to know anatomy as i would be just following the 2d concept

 yeah, you should just give up right now.

sacboi

@osama9595 fair enough determining character modelling may not be your thing, afterall anatomy studies can be a daunting exercise for a novice too takle solo. I mean upon reflection on more than one occasion I'd come close to losing my marbles under the table during a 2yr formal fine arts course of study way back in the day and that circumstance was enacted in a classroom environment.

Now although it's quite understandable mechanical HS may at face value be a preferable option pursuing however to be entirely honest will represent a fairly robust challenge and at the risk of being just a tad biased, at the end of the day even more so in fact than a organic leaning route. Anyway I'm of the firm belief in giving things a go attitude so rather than choosing an assumed less 'bumpy' road upfront why not answer a few questions for yourself by enrolling in a workshop?! To wit, I'll strongly recommend checking out Scott Eaton:

http://www.scott-eaton.com/anatomy-for-artists-online-course

The course is geared towards artists, therefore making learning such a complex dense subject a much less of an arduous chore, besides which the student will be taught/mentored by a pioneer in digital figurative sculpting. Lastly other than exspence I'd hazard a guess if you do decide enrolling might at least pre-empt those annoying "what if?" queries that tend to typically crop up at the most inopportune times later down the track.

Cheers.

carvuliero

That will depends on what kind of character and style are you planning to make and for what usage

You will need anatomy for high end photorealistic character maybe a little for semi realistic other then that you need basic representation of the forms -> boxes spheres cylinders stuff like that

Why did you think most people are doing stylized character -> fast and easy to do without too much knowledge