Anatomy and Art

A little while back, I found myself needing to show the coronary vessels of the heart, but our purchased model didn’t include them.  It wound up being a nice opportunity to dive into some good anatomy again, and play with sweep nurbs in Cinema 4D.  I didn’t think this would work as well as it did, but I simply drew splines around the heart model where the coronary vessels would go, and created sweep nurbs over them.

The real finesse point was realizing that you can actually make sweep nurbs swell and get smaller with a pull down graph in the panel settings, which allowed me to have vessels swell when they would meet, and just look more natural overall.

And in the end, I thought they looked great. 🙂

Seems like about a couple of times a year I get it in my head to try and tackle coding in some way shape of form.  Unfortunately, I’m not good at it.  But one of these days I hope for something to finally click.  This particular time, I’m looking at a thing called Processing.  I think it’s basically a fancier level of javascript that’s geared toward artists.  The tutorials are definitely set up to start at the beginning, unlike last year when I thought I’d just figure out Unity (for which I found painstakingly slow explanations of things like shapes, but everything just assumed you knew at least a couple of coding languages going in).  Anyway, I thought I’d share the link here for anyone else who wants to play around with this a little.  A little ways in to the tutorial videos, you get a sandbox to play in there (and if you’re not used to that expression, that’s a place to try typing the code where you can see what it does without first having to work it into an html file for yourself and open it in a browser).
processing.org

And if you want to get really fancy, Paper.js looks really cool too.  But I think it’s still too far over my head.  Even so, the home page is just lovely to play with.
paperjs.org

It’s nice having friends who send you stuff like this 🙂