Anatomy

The human body is designed to move and can be understood within the context of mechanical engineering. The human body, and the body of any biological entity, is at its most basic level a very complex and well-engineered machine (Fig. 9.1). All human characters are made of the same number of mechanical parts. They have a head, chest, pelvis, two arms with hands at the end, and two legs with feet at the end. Because the number of parts does not vary, it is possible to create a prototype character with generic characteristics, and use it as a base model for later characters, thus simplifying and making more efficient subsequent iterations of the modeling process. The aim of this chapter is to provide you with enough information to make such a prototype, so that you will know exactly what you are doing whenever you work with a character model in the future. The material presented here is primarily specific to human anatomy, but is generically applicable to any animal with a tetrapod body plan. This includes birds, lizards, mammals, and some cetaceans.