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So, before we jump and start sculpting all of the cool anatomy that we have for this

character, there's a couple of things that I want you to learn about muscles, because

it's going to allow us to understand all of these complex shapes that we have right here.

And I like to call this lesson Muscle Theory.

This is a lesson that I've been polishing for a long time now, and now you guys are

going to learn it.

So, Muscle Theory are several points that we're going to be learning about how muscles

work and how they behave for a character, either stylized, realistic, whatever kind

of character you're doing.

Let's take the first muscle as an example, which is going to be the pectoral muscle.

So, every single muscle that we have on the body has something called an origin, and something

called, let's use a different color, an insertion, okay?

So, the origin of the muscle is always going to be closer to the center of the body.

In the case of the pectoral muscle, its origin is the clavicle.

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The sternum and some ribs that we have down here.

So all of these things that I'm drawing with green, this is called the origin of our muscle.

And the insertion point, believe it or not, is all the way in the arm,

like underneath all of the deltoids and the bicep.

It goes really, really, really deep and it inserts itself on the humerus, the bone on the arm.

So all of these things that we see right here, they create an insertion point.

They create the fibers of the muscles that are going to be doing this sort of movement.

Now, the pectoral muscle, we're going to talk about this one specifically later on,

but the pectoral muscle does a very interesting twist as it goes into the arm.

So the fibers from this side go up and the fibers from this side go down,

but that's not really important for the muscle theory that we're seeing right now.

One of the important things, though, is that every single muscle will start in the origin

with something called a tendon. So we're going to have the tendon right here,

then the main mass of the muscle, the volume of the muscle,

and then the tendon that goes all the way to the insertion point.

So this is muscle theory point number one.

Every single muscle on the body, little asterisk there because there's like two or three that do not have this rule,

but most muscles in the body will have an origin point and an insertion point.

A muscle that does not have an insertion point, for instance, is the tongue.

The tongue does not have an insertion, so it just like stops right there.

So that's the first thing.

Second rule of muscles.

Muscles, the main function of a muscle is to contract.

Okay, so the main mass of the muscle will contract,

and that contraction is what generates the movement that we have in our body.

So in the case of the pectoral muscle, for instance, when we contract the pectoral muscles,

we bring our arms closer together to the core of our body.

If we do this right here, what we're doing is we're contracting the muscles on the back

to bring the arms and the chest out.

So doing this, we contract the pectoral muscle.

Doing this, we expand the pectoral muscle.

But it's not that we're expanding the pectoral muscle.

We're actually contracting the muscles on the back, which brings me to point number

three, for every action, there's always going to be a muscle again, little asterisk

right there, not always, but most of the time, if there's a muscle that does one

action, such as the pectoral muscle, bringing our arms closer, there's going

to be another action that's going to do the opposite action.

In the case of the arm, for instance, we got the bicep that brings our arm closer

to us, and then we got the tricep that brings the arm out or towards the other

part of our body.

So every muscle has an origin and an insertion.

The main function of the muscles is going to be to contract, to bring one part of

our body closer to another one.

And for every muscle that has an action, there's usually going to be a muscle

that's going to have the opposite action.

This is very important because this allows us to design more complex shapes and

creatures later on, if we want to utilize this information to create our own stuff.

Fourth point or fourth like little cool information about muscle theory.

In regards to this movement, you're going to see that usually the tendon closer to the origin

is going to be smaller than the tendon that goes towards the insertion.

And the best example I can give you with this is like a little chicken leg.

We've all had like chicken legs, right? So when we are having like a drumstick,

you guys are going to see that most of the meat of the muscle is going to be on this upper part.

And you can see it here on the character. If we go, for instance, to the forearm,

you're going to see that most of the muscle mass of the forearm is going to be closer to the origin,

which is this section. And as we go to the hand, we got a lot of very long tendons

that control our fingers. Same thing happens here.

I know we're not seeing it right now because we got the pants, but you can imagine

on the leg right here, most of the mass is going to be on this area.

And then things become more bony and more tenderness as we go to the lower portion.

Same thing for the pectoral muscle. Most of the mass of the pectoral muscle is going to be on this area

right here and as we go closer and closer to the arm things become thinner, thinner, stronger and

we get like the tendon that goes all the way to the arm. So every single muscle, this is a very very

fun thing, every single muscle, the deltoid for instance, we're going to have most mass up here

and then they all kind of like collapse into a point as they go into the insertion point of the

muscle. So most of the mass of the muscle will usually be closer to the origin of the muscle

itself. That's point number four. Point number five. Names. If you have a muscle for instance

that is called a bicep, the name is a very cool way to understand what the muscle is doing. So

bicep brachialis for instance, which is our famous bicep, tells us hey bicep that means that the

muscle has two heads, two main volumes that make up its like most of itself.

If we have a last name on the muscle, like this brachialis, that means that there's another

bicep somewhere, in this case it's on the leg, it's called biceps femoris because it's

on the femur.

So knowing the little clues that you have on the names of the muscles is a very cool

way to understand how these muscles work or where they are.

So for instance, we have biceps brachialis, we have just triceps, it's not triceps brachialis

because there's no other triceps on the body.

We have, for instance, the deltoid, so we don't have deltoid brachialis because there

is no deltoid femoris.

So if you don't have a last name, then that means that there's usually that unique name.

However, the name of the element, for instance, the deltoid, which is another muscle, deltoid

comes from delta, which is I believe Greek for shield, and I like the name because the

letter D, it's very similar to how the muscle looks.

The muscle has three main parts and it does this sort of shape right here.

So people often ask me, do I need to learn all of the muscles of the human body,

which I believe are more like the 680.

And the answer is no, we only need to learn about the superficial or

superficial muscles that we have.

And the number is a lot more manageable.

It's like 60.

And again, if we try to understand the body in segments in like small pieces,

it becomes a lot easier to, to learn.

So the way we're going to be dividing our body is as follows.

We are going to have the chest.

Okay.

The chest is going to be the first part that we're going to be working with.

We're going to have the back.

The back of the character, that's going to be another section.

So you can imagine if we're building like a, like a little box right here, we're

going to have our chest muscles, all of the chest muscles, and then on the back

of the character, we're going to have, of course, all of the back muscles.

Then we're going to have the arms, which of course the arms play an important

role with the chest and the back, because we have the deltoid and several

muscles that connect to each other.

That's going to be the arms, upper arms.

Then we're going to have the lower arms, or the forearms, which are all of these pieces right here.

That's going to be like another building block for ourselves, right around there.

And of course we're going to have eventually the hands, which have their own sort of like anatomy.

So this is where we're going to have the hands.

Then we're going to have the hips, which again play an important role.

I've ran out of colors.

The hips, they play an important role with the chest as well, so they're going to be right around here.

It's part of the abdomen and where most of the leg connections happen.

And then we're going to have the upper leg, which is going to be right around here.

We're going to have the lower leg, which is going to be right around here.

And we're going to have the feet.

So as you can see right here, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

And of course finally, the head and the neck is going to be our 10.

So it's 10 main shapes that I normally sculpt with.

like traditional humanoid characters that we're going to be breaking down so that we can learn

what bones make them up, what are the muscles that we normally see, and how all of these muscles

connect to each other. So that's the first part here on muscle theory. There's still a little bit

more information that I want to share before we actually start and to sculpt this anatomy.

So the next thing has to do a little bit more with sculpting principles. All of those things

that I just mentioned are more like anatomy principles. So let's take a look at some

sculpting principles. One of the main mistakes that I see people make when they try to create

anatomy is that they go and see the wrinkles, they see the fat pads, they see the skin and they

want to capture that. And even though it's fine that we try to see those shapes, we need to see

the main volumes first. So we need to break down the muscles into simple shapes that we can

understand and project into our elements. It really helps with stylized characters that we usually

want to go for this sort of like sharp angles.

But in order to understand the forms, we need to understand how the muscle is made.

So again, going here, for instance, onto the pectoral muscle, even though that I know that

the insertion goes all the way to the arm, I can also see that most of the stuff that we're seeing

is right here only. Do we have a layer? There we go. So if we just like mark,

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let me make my brush a little bit smaller. There we go. If we just mark the silhouette of the

muscle, we're going to be able to start seeing the simplified shapes that make up this muscle.

So as you can see, by finding this angles on the muscle, it's a lot easier to understand what's

going on. The next thing I need to find or I need to learn how to see is the light and the shadow

of the volumes. So you can see here the concept artist did an amazing job on letting us know that

all of this part right here is in shadow. So that tells me that the pectoral muscle is this like

very big block that has a change in planes going down.

and creating this shadow right here.

So if I can create or recreate this polygon shape that I'm showing you right here,

instead of trying to focus on the pectoral muscle itself,

just this like very cool wireframe,

it's going to be a lot easier for me to build everything else.

And you can do, and we're going to be doing this pretty much for all of the muscles,

you can do this with all of the muscles by going to all of these different sections.

For instance, this right here, it's like a little sphere,

and we also see that we have a little bit of shadow right around here.

So instead of trying to focus on, again, the folds in the skin,

I'm going to focus on the main shapes of all of these muscles,

and that's what's going to allow me to capture all of the information

from the muscle that we need to build the whole character.

Okay?

Now, I do have a reference file that I'm going to be sharing with you.

I don't have it open right now.

But in this one, there's a lot of other examples from other characters,

and we're going to be adapting certain things.

For instance, right here in this area, this is very nondescripted,

like we're not really seeing each individual fiber.

or parts of the muscle. So it might not look exactly like what it does right here in the concept, but we're going to make it in an anatomically correct. Okay, so yeah, that's pretty much it for this one, my friends, this again, are some very important points to understand about muscles. And again, this is one of the secrets about 3d. It's not only about like seeing an image and copying it, it's about understanding why we're doing it and why things work the way they do. Because knowledge is power in the allows us to as artists become a lot more proficient in

understanding why we do the things that we do. Okay, so this is it. Now we we understand how muscles work, we understand why they're important, we're going to be going over all of these points quite a bit more. And I'm going to be showing you now how to sculpt the chest muscles inside of a seabird. So let's get to it.