SciePro’s Sebastian Kaulitzki on how he uses V-Ray to bring human anatomy to life in 3D

Sebastian Kaulitzki knew from a young age that he wanted to work in 3D. What started as a hobby at 14 years old later grew into a career, pairing his love of 3D design with his interest in human anatomy to become a 3D artist and medical illustrator. After moving to Berlin, Germany, in 2005, he founded his own company, SciePro. The studio initially offered a broad range of 3D services, but began to gain real traction after Sebastian specialized in scientific and medical subjects.

As Sebastian began building his first team for SciePro, he started looking into V-Ray and “completely fell in love with it.” V-Ray helped the growing SciePro team take their models to the next level, and the company now offers one of the most comprehensive 3D anatomy libraries available to professionals. Sebastian’s team of over 20 experts creates medically reviewed, state-of-the-art 3D medical models and animations that power medical education, medtech and pharma communications, and scientific innovation across the globe.

In this Q&A, SciePro founder Sebastian Kaulitzki explains why V-Ray is SciePro’s renderer of choice, reveals some of the team’s favorite V-Ray features, and shares a selection of their detailed and captivating 3D medical illustrations and animations.

What is your typical workflow and how does V-Ray fit into it?

We start with our medical experts. They define exactly what needs to be shown and verify anatomical accuracy. Our 3D artists then build the model, sculpt details, lay out UDIM textures and prepare everything in 3ds Max.

Today, we focus entirely on medically accurate 3D models of human anatomy. We use 3ds Max and V-Ray for most of our visuals and make heavy use of the VrayDisplacement Modifier, VrayClipper, and the lighting and material tools V-Ray provides.

The workflow is straightforward: Medical input → modeling → shading → animation → rendering → compositing.

At the end of the day, we are creating 3D models. They are extremely complex and incredibly accurate, but it is still a 3D model. Right now, we are experimenting a lot with how to improve the transition of tendons to bone surfaces, how to use the V-Ray Material to push realism on connective tissue, and how to show thin fascia layers without them looking like plastic.

Depending on the complexity, an illustration takes a couple of days. An animation can take a few weeks. V-Ray is the point where everything comes together visually. It gives us predictable lighting, clean materials, and lets us dial in realism without fighting the software. It keeps the technical part out of the way, so we can focus on anatomy.

Why did you choose to use V-Ray for your models?

It was a no-brainer for me. I have almost 20 years of experience with V-Ray. V-Ray has the right balance between visual quality and production reliability. It gives us great lighting, clean GI, and predictable shading across thousands of assets.

Our anatomy models are huge, high-poly, and packed with thin membranes and subsurface materials. V-Ray handles this without issues, even on extreme UDIM setups and heavy displacement. Render nodes might use up to 128 GB RAM, though 🙂

We tried other renderers—either the subsurface scattering looked plasticky, the GI was unstable, or the render times were unpredictable.

On top of that, V-Ray integrates well with 3ds Max, our pipeline, and our render farm. Distributed rendering and the V-Ray denoiser save time. The material system is flexible enough to handle skin, bone, fluids, and microstructures without hacks.

Do you have a favorite V-Ray feature?

I think V-Ray GPU and distributed rendering. It turns our render farm into one big engine and lets us iterate fast. When you’re fine-tuning subsurface scattering on a nerve or blood vessel, instant feedback is important. Also, the V-Ray Material, and especially the ALsurface Material, are great. I don’t need a dozen hacks to get physically correct skin, bone, and fluids. It just works. I also like the V-Ray Clipper a lot.

Any other thoughts on using V-Ray and its impact on your work?

V-Ray removes uncertainty. In medical visualization, we can’t hide behind a style or dramatic lighting. Things have to look correct. V-Ray gives us clean lighting, predictable shading, and it handles complex scenes without drama. Instead of fighting noise or weird GI behavior, we can focus on getting the anatomy right. That saves us time and avoids headaches. We have used V-Ray to render more than 100,000 illustrations over the last decade. 

Your social media accounts are huge—has this helped grow the business or led to interesting opportunities?

Yes. This was a huge surprise for us. Posting short anatomy renders on social media has played a big role in getting more attention and becoming independent from platforms.

People see the work, share it, and it reaches audiences we would never reach through traditional marketing. Some of our animations have more than 300 million views, which is totally crazy. Many of our big clients found us because they saw a render on Instagram or LinkedIn. Social media is basically how our models ended up in front of pharma companies, medtech firms and universities. 

For many years I didn’t believe that social media was the right tool for our business, but I was proven wrong. And to be honest, almost everyone has at least one social media app on their phone. Only a small fraction of our followers turn into clients, but we might have a B2C offer in the future. 🙂

See more of SciePro’s work on their website, follow them on Instagram, or stay updated on LinkedIn.