This was inspired by the anatomical figures at the Body Worlds exhibit. They were frightening yet beautiful, although the muscles were dried. I wanted to create one with "live" slimy muscles to push the meaty look of the muscles. I also wanted to capture the organic uneven look that muscles have which is not present in a lot of anatomy drawings.

I took a year to do this although I worked on it in sporadic bursts when I had freetime. In the process I tought myself XSI 5.11 mental ray (probably tried out every option of the skin shader), and got to spend a lot of time texturing and sculpting detail in zbrush. The base model is around 5000 polys , with most of the details from the displacement and normal maps. I tweaked the render in photoshop by pushing details even further. I hope to do future studies to gauge my process of anatomy study.