@Tonatiuh @KickAir_8p I’ll spend some time this week to update the bundle for the 4.0 release.
If you have any updated base meshes you’d like to have included, let me know.
Otherwise it’s also fine to add them after the release once they are ready.
For example the ecorche, planar and skeleton assets were still WIP.
Uf, I don’t think I can finish anything this week… sorry
I’m still working on this, but I have much less time for it than I originally anticipated, several Real Life ™ issues popping up / going on longer than I thought, and doubt I’ll get it done this week, sorry.
@JulienKaspar If you mean my sculpt under ecorche, it was made only for testing purposes and since LP topology has changed, sculpting has to be redone from scratch (I guess)
However, I am running through the deadline (a massive collaboration with a dozen of studios, together we are going to build up 70km2 area, our studio recieve and organize all the concepts data, there are lots of trash from different software to break through), so I am not sure that I would be able to make a resculpt.
Also there are some questions about bundle.
Which way ecorche is originally expected? (A sculpt, a solid model or a complex model with separate muscles ontop this skeleton)
What are requirements of a skeleton to male model matching. Should not the skull be matched as well?
Is female skeleton version expected?
Previously we solved that with short Obname to Meshname script which sends all the objects names of a selection to their meshnames equalizing them.
We also provided the opposite function to close workflow loop
Such a mechanics is pretty useful for naming process and especially for exports to file formats where naming is important.
@Tonatiuh also put some work into a detailed ecorche sculpt.
About the questions:
Using any of the realistic base meshes and sculpting multires details on top is the best way imo. Sculpting muscles as individual objects seems overkill.
Matching the skeleton to the male is a bonus. I’m fine with leaving the proportions as it is. The only thing missing at this point for the asset to be complete are UV maps.
A female skeleton and skull is not expected atm. If someone is willing to work on it that would be wonderful. This could even just be a deformed alternative to the male skeleton, using the same mesh.
I think it would be interesting to use the latest LP for the sculpting base, since it is intentionally designed for multires sculpting purpose.
Previous ecorche sculpt iteration has been made for testing purposes which allowed to discover several topological problems which are supposed to be fixed to this time, so it is assumed that LP v11 is ready for such kind of a multires sculpting.
Hope, @Tonatiuh will consider such a possibility)
I’ll love to do the escorche and fit it to whatever mesh or proportion you prefere, the problem is allocating time… Also I’m a bit disconnected with the work you are doing so I didn’t check the skeleton or the meshes… Sorry, I’ll ask for help to catch up once I have time to spare.
Totally understand you.
Unfortunately, production is a run from deadline to deadline, so time allocating is quite expensive.
For example, when we was finishing Bel temple reconstruction, which was a model made simultaneously for UE and 3dprinting (before nanite), I step into 3 month 24/7 deadline after which I was forced to learn how to walk from scratch, so some tasks assumes not only time allocating, but also health allocating.
This is why it is extremely important software design to be deadline-proof - without Blender we would not be able to handle it in any way.
Meanwhile, it looks like we made it through, so now we are exporting final result)
So I decided to spend this given time doing something useful.
I analyzed my previous ecorche sculpt process and has come to the conclusion that it was quite bruteforce and far from being effective - checking references and defining muscle shapes only with sculpting tools took too much efforts.
This time I decided to make a preparation step, and this step is defining muscles with retopo to get a decsent sculpting guidelines. Workflow-wise it looks like regular retopo:
According to my tests such a guidelines could be transferred across the other shapes using LP shapekeys and Surface Deform Modifier, and it could be also tweaked/refined quite easily, so in my opinion it will be useful to anyone who will decide to make a detailed ecorche sculpt.
Well, all that deity quite quickly and predictably turned into the full scale retopology.
4k vertices, 100% quads, muscle seams are marked as UV seams to make them retrievable, separate muscles colorized by material (4 colour theorem, one day I will order a script that solve that), topology flow tries to follow muscles direction
Also fixed several issues, like wrist muscle connections and made several precise refinements. Ribs are a bit messed up, but different sources display them differently.
Wooow! This would be a really useful resource (at least to me, heh) for having in the base bundle.
It has certain advantages, for example it is nice to have muscles colorized, and I like its low polycount which makes it easy to tweak or project to the surface. I think it is ready:
Here is the latest file, I fixed shapekeyed LP (a bit of tweaking to restore symmetry), added Ecorche model and bounded it to a copy of a shapekeyed LP with Surface Deform modifier for quick shaping and testing purposes.
Bundle Skeleton+Blockouts+Head+LP_v12.blend
@1D_Inc That is quite impressive work. Looks great, if not a bit overkill?
I’ll check out the model in more detail. It would be great to project the detailed muscle sculpt onto this base. Might be a bit tricky with the amount of stretched faces and poles.
Either way it’s not going to end up as a model that people can work with this way. It’s more of a detailed reference.
Would that still be useful/preferred?
Thank you.
I think that it could be a nice addition to planar models we are going to have - proper multires sculpt will be quite heavy - mine took 700k vertices and it required an else one multires subdivision level in my opinion to make muscles shapes sharp enough, especially neck muscles, and it also has got several anatomic errors that I fixed in this model.
I am not very happy with my sculpt, it was made as a draft mostly for testing purposes. But I am not sure that I will have enough time to make a better one.
The main benefit of this model is that it is technically the cheapest (lightweight) ecorche reference realization for its visual clarity and detalization.
So yes, it was intentionally designed to be used as a visual reference.
Makes sense.
I’ll add it to the repository and check how the model can be added to the next upload. Maybe I’ll find some time to do a deep dive into ecorche sculpting to add some details to it 
The main problem of this is sculpt is that it utilizes obsolete LP, so it is needed to be transferred to the new one. Can you please share how did you transferred skull details from sculpt to retopo?
Was that shrinkwrap?
I decided to make some tests, so I shrinkwrapped ecorche model to LP sculpting base with tiny offset, removed all the geometry except sharp edges and tried to mark muscles contours with crease brush and lazy mouse.
Well, it is much easier to draft muscles contours on the sculpting base now, instead of interruptions and comparisons with multiple references the entire process turned into quite linear job.
The same technique is used during classic subtractive sculpting, for example, during working with marble.
I think that making a manifold ecorche reference model was the right step, taking into account the ability to modify and pose it.
I suddenly has got spare time and decided to detail ecorche sculpt further.
This time I tried to make subtractive sculpt in order to achieve more natural forms, so I switched from clay strips to clay brush.
Found several anatomic issues, so ecorche model will require update,
also reached 5th multires level (2.7 mln vertices), but my laptop is able to handle it very smooth, so, in general, it goes pretty well.
Looks much more useful than starting with a sphere
Well, starting with a sphere is, for sure, a nice artistic motorics training.
But for sculpting a specific character from exact reference I would indeed prefer an easily adjustable lowpoly sculpting base, because it is easier to match it to the reference and avoid correcting missing proportions in a destructive way, which becomes expensive towards the end of the work.
The sculpture making process consists of two main stages
Dyntopo and remesh techniques as general shape definition methods are beneficial in macro detailing, and multires as a local feature definition method is beneficial for micro detailing.
Since a humanoid character has predictable general shapes and structure, its macro-detail stage can be replaced with a generic base sculpting mesh, which is expected to allow it to reach the micro-detail stage more quickly, precise and less destructively.
Meanwhile
It was also a nice practical test of a proposed versatile lowpoly sculpting base - in general this concept works pretty well. Not entirely sure about ear topology, but I didnt succeed to design a better one)
Multires sculpt has shapekeys obtained from LPs with applied mirror modifier.
Since the sculpt was based on the same LP, such kind of shapekeys transition is also applicable - it is possible to shape mirrored LP that contain only a half of a mesh, then apply the mirror modifier and join the resulting shape to the sculpted mesh as a shapekey.
For sure using such a shapekeys will bring some details distortion, but in my opinion it is easier to fix those local issues manually than to sculpt everything from scratch, so the resulting system has good reusability.
Here is a file with everything together (LowPolys with mirror modifier, multires ecorche sculpt and ecorche reference model).
1D_Sculpting_set_v01.blend
