Patient Anatomy Styleframes

Medical animation often requires visuals of patient anatomy to help tell the story. During the look/dev phase of a project, we try to explore as many visual approaches as we can, ensuring the client has sufficient options to choose from. The human figure often triggers an emotional reaction from the target audience (as well as your client!) and can be the element that can make or break a science video.

If its overly stylized it can alienate the audience. If we’ve seen 50 medical animations, odds are we’ve seen 50 neon blue glass men on a dark background.

On the other hand, If it’s too realistic it could start to feel creepy or gory. The goal is to try to connect with the audience and create a sense of empathy to the patient’s plight, which means trying to find the sweet spot between the 2 extremes.

When creating patient anatomy visuals, we often start with our anatomically accurate human figure libraries, but from there, our zbrush artists and riggers will sculpt and then pose our figures to reflect the particular demographic that will to be the focus of the video.

Here is a series of styleframes which show our typical process, but using one model rendered in different ways. The patient needed to be a male in his 60s showing signs of health problems. Thanks for looking!

Below are some other examples showing various approaches to representing human anatomy in 3D used in various projects..