Patient Education & Surgical Visualization

Selected work from a series of patient education animations produced for a major orthopedic device company. The reel covers photoreal surgical scenes, layered shoulder anatomy, and the patient-facing storytelling that surrounds a joint replacement — preparation, the operating room, and recovery. Also featured: a facial transformation sequence from a gender affirmation surgery video, my first large project in the series.

Characters were built from 3D face scans, with skin detail carried through displacement and subsurface shading. Base meshes from the scan library were mixed and masked with painted vertex maps, then animated with pose morph targets for expression and facial change over time — most visibly in the transformation sequence, shown alongside the underlying skull anatomy.

Hair began as Daz 3D assets, shaped parametrically before export. In Cinema 4D, a tiny fraction of the imported splines — well under 1% — were sampled evenly and converted into hair guides, keeping the original style while leaving a light rig for custom grooming onto the scanned heads. That workflow will get its own case study soon.

Everything was modeled, animated, and rendered in Cinema 4D with Redshift. Device and instrument shots are excluded per client confidentiality.