Our First Human 3D Model for a Plastic Surgery Website: A Journey into Rigging, Ballet, and Beauty

Since this project involved a lot of rigging, let’s quickly explain what that means.

Every 3D model has a digital skeleton — a structure of joints and bones. The more realistic the model, the more complex the animation becomes, because human movement is powered by muscles… which 3D models don’t naturally have.

Rigging is the process of prepping a model for animation. You build a system of joints (yes, they’re literally called joints) and controllers that allow the skeleton to move in a natural way. This is what enables lifelike animation.

The more detailed the model, the trickier the rig. A simple low-poly character is easy to animate. A hyperrealistic MetaHuman model? Not so much — way more joints, way more complexity.

Add to that constraints for each bone (so they don’t twist unnaturally), weight painting (to make sure the skin deforms realistically), and finally skinning — binding the mesh to the skeleton. It’s a lot.

Facial rigging is a whole other beast. It’s often more difficult than animating a full-body dance, because human expressions involve dozens of tiny muscle groups. Think: smile, surprise, subtle eyebrow raises. That’s what makes a virtual human feel alive.

For us, this was all brand-new territory. We’re used to experimenting, but this project really pushed us into a new skill zone.

One of Russia’s leading plastic surgery clinics — Dega — approached us for a full website refresh. The goal? Make it more elegant, aesthetic, and memorable.

Our creative spark came from the metaphor of becoming “the best version of yourself.”
We immediately thought of the golden ratio — nature’s blueprint for beauty and balance. It felt like the perfect visual anchor for a clinic that helps people enhance their appearance with symmetry and precision.

And then there was the name. Dega — like Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist known for sketching and painting ballet dancers. He was fascinated by how fabric moved and how bodies expressed emotion. That obsession with form and motion hit close to home.

There was also Irina Dega — a renowned Soviet ballerina — who, fun fact, was married to artist Nathan Altman.
Everything started to click.

Ballet. Beauty. Motion. Precision. The aesthetic ideals of plastic surgery and the ethereal grace of dance suddenly became part of the same story.

At first, we wanted to animate swirling lines wrapping around the body — tracing the golden ratio and reshaping features as they moved. Imagine a spiral that flows across the face and subtly transforms the nose or eyes. It looked great in our heads.

We mocked it up using Stable Diffusion. It gave us a compelling reference image — so good that the client fell in love with it and kept asking for “this, but animated.”

Reality check: AI-generated images are tough to turn into usable assets. They look cool, but they’re not rigged, not editable, and don’t translate into animation pipelines.

We tried everything — procedural generation, texture-driven movement, simulation. But no matter the approach, the lines moved with the body, not on the body. That’s a no-go.

So we pivoted.

Instead of fighting the tech, we focused on what we could control: the elegance and poise of a ballerina.

We studied hours of ballet footage on YouTube. At one point, we seriously considered filming a live dancer to capture real motion. We basically became honorary ballet historians.

The final model is abstract and textured with flowing lines — an artistic interpretation of the golden ratio. It’s a visual bridge between symmetry, beauty, and transformation — all values central to the clinic’s work.

The 3D ballerina isn’t just decorative. She plays a key UX role.

Hover over a service block like “cosmetology,” and the model’s focus shifts to the face. Choose “diagnostics,” and a white ribbon wraps around the torso. It’s dynamic, intuitive, and helps guide the user through the site.

For us, this was a major leap. We’d never worked with full human 3D models before. Now we have. And we learned a ton.

Projects like this — where art meets challenge — are our favorites. The new Dega Clinic website isn’t just beautiful. It made us better designers.

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