Photorealistic 3D Heart (animated heartbeat!)

3D Model

@a0970198538 Hi! Unfortunately this model consists of just the outer surface. It does not include any anatomical structures on the inside.

Hey Doc, I want to ask whether this model can be divided into various parts, like right ventricle, right atrium, left ventricle, left atrium and coronary artery. I want to apply this model and animation to help people know more about the heart's anatomy structure.

@timvanhooft Hey Tim! Thank you very much for your feedback and instructions for Unreal users! I am really glad you could find a solution!

Hey Doc, that was exactly what was the issue! Thanks for your quick reply. So for those that want to import the animations from Blender to Unreal Engine, make sure the shape keys import is selected.

@timvanhooft hey Tim! have you received my email? there are several videos on this topic listed on youtube (search for "blender shape keys to unreal")

hi Doc, i just sent you an email, hope you can help me out!

@davidfernandezberlin I'm glad I could help! And thank you for your kind feedback! :)

oMG! Best support ever. Thank you very much. It's many months since I got in love with your heart (I mean the 3D model!) and now I can really enjoy it fully, looks really awesome! Thanks a lot once more! And congratulations for your great job

@davidfernandezberlin I've found the reason for the described phenomenon. Blender rendered the 3d heart and all of its morph targets (which have no materials assigned). I've unchecked "show in renders" on all morph targets, now it looks fine. A new file is attached to the project (3dheart_blender.zip) that already includes the described changes.

Hi! Wow thanks a lot for such a fast reaction and for the Blender file.

But unfortunately the rendering results are exactly the same. Half of the heart is white and nothing looks even closer to the viewport. With eevee and Cycles the same...

When I rendered the viewport¡s Shading or Material preview the heart looks exactly as seen in the viewport, but in Render view everything goes wrong. I tried with different settings, also Blender 2.8 and 3 with same results. I tried many different settings for lights and for shading, but the white part stays always the same.

What else can I try? Where could the problem be?

@davidfernandezberlin I've just uploaded a basic blender scene with blender's default HDRI environment and two point lights. You should be able to download the scene as an additional file attached to the project (blender_scene.zip, 33 MB).

happy rendering! :)

@davidfernandezberlin Thank you for your purchase, David! Blender uses Eevee for viewport rendering, a real-time renderer that produces very nice results especially when rendering the 3D heart. My material setup was as follows:

Surface: Principled BSDF, GGX, Christensen-Burley

Base Color and Subsurface Color: 3D heart Image Texture

Subsurface: 0.864

Specular: 0.620

Roughness: 0.022

Normal: Normal Map Tangent Space, Strength: 0.200, using the provided 3D heart Normal Map

Now, what you wanna check are the lights in your scene as well as the environment. Blender uses its own default HDRI environment. In final renders, is usually switches to the environment you have set up for your scene. I have tried out several HDRI environments and played around with their strength to make the final render look as close as possible to what I've seen in the viewport. I've placed a small Point light in the front and a stronger / bigger Point light in the back. This setup looks very nice in Eevee and Cycles. Cycles renders a lot slower though - it's a physically based render engine. For a scene like the 3D heart I would stick with Eevee, also for final renders.

Let me know if my explanations brought you a step further!

Best regards,

Georg

Finally I bought it!

In UA4 it looks really weird, I could not make it look decent.

In Blender it looks amazing! But when I render it, with Cycles, it looks almost totally white, and doesn't look at all like in the viewport or in your sample.

Do you know what could I do?

Thanks a lot in advance

Good to know, thanks for your answer

@davidfernandezberlin

In the end it all depends on the individual skills

It won’t look exactly the same in any application until you make it do so ;)

@docgfx Auch! I understand ... but I hesitate to invest in such a model if it won't look the same in this platform ... I am also a beginner in UA4 and I am not sure which problems I can encounter with the looks and the way it will render. I hope somebody can bring some info about it!

Unfortunately I have no experience with Unreal Engine. The final look of course depends on the material settings such as reflectivity, glossiness, reflection environment,…

But I guess everything that can be achieved on Sketchfab should be possible in UE, Blender etc. as well.

@docgfx Thanks for your quick reply.

What about Unreal Engine? Actually I planned to try it there... it's a bit pricy for me, just want to be sure it looks the same. I mean .. the look is so organic and real ! Does it look the same in UA4?

Thanks again!

@davidfernandezberlin

Thank you!

It should work well. I just imported the .fbx file into Blender for testing.

The file contains the base model and 3 animation targets - Blender shows the 25 frame animation exactly as seen on Sketchfab.

Only the material looked weird right after import until I disabled "Backface Culling" in its settings.

This work looks really impressive!

Can I use it inside my compositions of UA4 and Blender as a mesh and light it and animate it ?