Anatomy and Art

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve been working on this blood vessel fly through animation for my first animation in Maya.  Well, just last week, I got my render passes and started compositing them in After Effects. Really, this just amounted to using a standard beauty pass, and a luminance depth pass.

If you’re new to 3D animation, a beauty pass, or it may also be called your master layer, is the basic image you’re rendering out of your scene. For instance, this is frame #38 from that pass…

A luminance depth pass on the other hand, is a black and white gradation representing the distance of objects in your scene to the camera. In 3DsMax this is called a z-depth pass. But in Maya, it’s best to use a luminance depth pass (yet another of the subtle differences between the two programs). My luminance depth pass for frame #38 looks like this…

Using the program After Effects, you can place a luminance depth layer in your timeline. Hide it, because it’s not that interesting to look at in and of itself. And then create an adjustment layer and apply a blur effect. In my case I chose the lens blur, but I understand that there are different ways of going about this. Once you are in your lens blur settings you can point that layer at your hidden layer, and it will use the black and white gradient as a guide or mask to set the blur according to the distance of objects. You’ll have to play with your settings a bit to get it right, but I’m happy with the subtle blur I got in the background of my animation in the end.

I had also intended to use an ambient occlusion pass, but mine came out too dark to make use of it. Again, if you are unfamiliar with this idea, the principle is that your render produces images based on the proximity of objects to the camera and each other. The image is darkest where things are in close proximity and lightest where they are not. They are also lighter when they are closer to the camera and fade off into the background as they get further away. Here is my frame #38 again to better illustrate the idea…

Because my scene is so dense and crowded, much of my ambient occlusion pass just came out black, so I wound up not using it at all. If I had, I would have placed it as a layer in After Effects, turned down the opacity, and set the blend mode to multiply so that the shadows would come through just lightly over the scene.

I also put a quick title card at the beginning of the clip and then exported the whole thing as a quicktime movie.  This allowed me to bring it all in to my editing software (Final Cut Pro).  There I made a few final tweaks, and added sound.

And here is the end result, hosted on Vimeo.  I’ve also got it up on YouTube, so feel free to take a look there if Vimeo isn’t working for any reason.

Blood Vessel Fly Through from sara egner on Vimeo.

So yeah, pretty neat!  And it feels great to have the big project for my Maya class taken care of so I can focus on my other work this last couple weeks of the fall semester.

Hey look everybody; Matt Cirigliano has a blog!
http://voracious.mcarts.net/

and cuing the obligatory silly photo from our first year in UIC’s biomedical visualization program…

Matt is an incredibly talented illustrator and 3D artist.  Add to that the patience of a saint, and the drive to go that extra mile to make a piece really stand out.  His work comes in two speeds, fun and epic.  And either way you’re getting something awesome.  I recommend giving his blog a read.

Last summer I met an occularist, Fred Harwin, and got to talking about the possibilities of making an artificial eye dilate.  The idea is that if you found light reactive or UV reactive pigments, that perhaps you could bring out the iris when in bright sunlight, and then that paint could disappear in darker situations thus simulating the natural dilation of an eye.  Well, the other night my old friend Ian Coulter called me about some reading he had been doing to this end.  I’d asked him some months back about if he’d ever come across anything like that in his years of sculpting.  Nothing came to mind at the time, but he got back with me the other day with a few links of interest.

http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/dyeblog/C763608095/E20100908081145/index.html

http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=JM&Year=2005&ManuscriptID=b505319f&Iss=34

http://www.forscher.com.br/ingles/index_ingles.htm

http://www.solarcolordust.com/Site/Products.html

Now I know, throwing down a bunch of links isn’t exactly quality journalism.  But the truth of the matter is, I want to keep track of them here for later reference myself.

It seems like no one is really designing these kinds of pigments for use in eyes, but I think that even making a bright purple eye would be worth it.  If it worked, you’d have something to go back to the company with and surely more natural colors could be designed.  Solar Color even offers free samples if you’re ready to show off a good project.  What could be cooler than this?

I’m going to have some prints made of that last painting of mine.  I spoke with a printer today and I like this place a lot better than the last place I spoke with.  It sounds like I can get good archival inks and papers with these guys, and they’re good enough to be able to look at my digital image, but also match it using the original canvas since I still have it in my possession for the time being.  That’s good, since the digital files tend to come through a little bit on the bright side. The place I’m using is called Gamma Imaging and they seem to be really on top of their game.

I’m planning to sell prints for $100 each, plus shipping and handling.  Each will be signed and numbered.  I’m going to make this a run of twelve.  Please contact me if you are interested in buying one.  Here is fine, or you can contact me directly.

Ok, I just found out there is a Skull a Day website.  How delightful.

http://www.skulladay.blogspot.com/

Want to test your color acuity?

X-Rite photo posted this little quiz…

http://xritephoto.com/ph_toolframe.aspx?action=coloriq

Well, it’s been a working weekend, and most of that work has gone towards my animation on orthagnathic surgery.  Yesterday I got my surgical plates and screws mostly together, though they could still use a few tweaks to get out the faceting, and there is one angle in the chin plate that I would still like to soften.  But mostly, this is what I’m going for.

And then today I finished my re-write on the script.  I’d still like to warn patients about the breathing tube and catheter, but it just doesn’t sink up with the animation visually or in terms of the type of information being given.  I’m hoping that I will have time to create some kind of Know Before You Go page that can be included in the dvd, or even printed out and given to patients with the animation disk.  Anyway, here is the script as it currently stands.  I think it works.

I often find myself thinking about where this whole scholastic track that I’ve put myself on will lead.  Will I actually get to be an anaplastologist?  Will I find myself working in animation?  Will I discover new innovations in how 3D animation software can be utilized to design and develop prostheses?  Will my time in the clinic afford me important experience with which to make educational animations and films?  Will I wind up doing something completely different?  The truth is, I just don’t know.  I came out here to get in to anaplastology with the intention of focusing on hands and fingers as a specialty, and just within the year medicare and various insurance companies stopped covering somato (and therefore finger and hand) patients for any anaplastologist not actively working with a licenced prosthetist.  Who could have anticipated that?  To keep competitive in facial prostheses I need to stay in practice with osseo integrated prostheses.  Next year I will be an intern, either with the clinic where I spend so much time now, or somewhere else.  While the thought of moving is daunting, I can’t help craving another view at this new world I’ve found.  This March I will be attending the annual International Association of Anaplastology conference for the first time.  It was a tough decision signing up for anything in March when I don’t know where I’d be living and therefore traveling from to attend yet, but I’m glad now that I registered.  I’m really looking forward to connecting with others in the business and getting more pieces in how the whole puzzle fits together.  Anyway, these are the meanderings of your sleepy blogger tonight.  Goodnight to you all.

They say the devil is in the details, and ain’t that the truth.  We recently did an assignment for my Maya class where we took a model from our final projects and used different lighting techniques and types of render passes for identical scenes.  It’s pretty clear here that one can achieve some really different looks by knowing what they are doing in their render settings.  Better still is that some of these can be combined later in After Effects to create a combination of looks as desired.

This first one is just standard raytracing.

This one is just with final gather, using a pumped up surface shader for a light, like the movie theater example.

Still in the Mental Ray renderer, this one uses both the final gathering shader applied to a plane, and also a standard spot light.

In this one, everything is on.

This is using the Maya Software renderer.  As you can see, I’ve lost the soft effect entirely from the modeling.

And lastly the ambient occlusion pass.

Pretty neat!