Anatomy and Art

This weekend I installed the Autodesk Education Suite for Entertainment Creation 2011 into my new desktop computer.  There may still be a couple things to sort out, but overall, my office has taken a right leap in terms of capabilities over these past few weeks.  Just tonight I brought in the .stl files I have been working on at school with Mimics.  There they are!

To get these, we ran a cat scan on a plastic skull model over at the craniofacial clinic.  The dicom data was then put onto disk and taken back to the biomedical visualization computer lab.  There I imported the files into Mimics and began the tedious process of sorting out the wanted bits from the unwanted bits, and deciphering layer by layer the mandible from the whole of the skull.  I have to say, the teeth were tricky to get right, but it looks like it came out pretty well.

Once the Mimics files were set up, I was able to create 3D models and export .stl files and save them to a thumb drive.  Tonight I imported those .stl files into my very own copy of 3DsMax and began sorting through extraneous polygons.  If you haven’t worked with these programs before, you might think of this as the 3D version of cleaning up the edges and unwanted specks from everything.  I still have quite a bit more of this to do.

I also got everything lined up.  The mandible and majority of the skull were from the same cat scan so they imported in perfect alignment, but the calvarium was done separately on account of the I-Cat not being large enough to scan the whole skull in one take (it is mostly used for dental purposes over there).

So far so good, and I’m looking forward to working with this model for my upcoming animation.  I decided to go with the plastic model in the end, rather than the actual patient data because it is more normalized, and I can alter it to create the pathology I want to focus on without a lot of other distracting anomalies getting in the way.  Actual people rarely come so standardized, especially the ones who are coming in for craniofacial surgery.  Plus I am able to get a much cleaner scan because there is no soft tissue to weed out of the data, and I’m also able to get cleaner teeth without distortion from metal braces, which any patient preparing for the procedure I will be animating would be wearing.

All in all, I think this is the best way to go, and I’m excited to get to start working on this from home now, rather than trying to remember the best hours to work in the computer lab at school.  And oh, after so much work in Maya recently, I’m surprised at how nice it is opening up 3DsMax again.  Yay.

So, these are fairy fantastic.  Fetal and skeletal bears, oh my!

Check out more by Stephanie Metz at her site!

http://www.artbysteph.com/portfolioTeddyNaturalHistory.html

Hey, lookie what I got in the mail 🙂

There is a little bit of a point of contention regarding when to use the word “instrument”, and when to use the word “tool”.  We are told that in surgery, one should refer such items as instruments.  This isn’t always what happens, but it seems to be the preferred way of saying things.  In dissection, I never heard the word “instrument” uttered once though.  We always spoke of “tools” and some of those are the same or very similar to some of the instruments used in surgery.

Similar distinctions get thrown around in art.  Musical instruments are obviously instruments.  Other than that, I will usually speak of tools, with some exception.  But learning to sculpt, the discussion was always that of tools.  There were tool users and there were non-tool users and anything could be a tool.  A toothpick can be the greatest tool ever.  Your fingernails are natural tools.  People sometimes make a big deal about tools, but find your basics and they will serve you well.  Branch out when they don’t do the job. I even keep my sculpting tools in a tool box.  I keep my paints and brushes in another tool box.  I’ve always rather liked thinking of these things as tools.  Tools are strong.  They allow us to manipulate the physical world around us beyond our body’s natural capacity.

Some people vastly prefer the word instrument though.  And I can see where the word has a certain amount of class to it.  It implies an element of delicacy, carries an air of formality.  In the surgical examples mentioned before I think it also creates a less intimidating dialogue for patients who are about to be the object of such instrumentation.  In art, I think it comes down more to the artist, and how they like to think about what they are doing.  And perhaps in anaplastology, the art becomes that much closer to surgery and begins to take on more of that terminology.

I am trying to learn to set my love for the concept of tools aside and use the term “instrument” more.  I find this most challenging with regard to my own work.  But yesterday working with laying down some wax in preparation for an acrylic substructure (early steps in an auricular prosthesis) I was very focused on the task at hand not at all focused on the politics of word connotation.   I was being shown a better way of doing the job, and it involved borrowing something from the person teaching me how to do it.  I slipped again and asked her if I could keep using the better tool while she went to lunch and it was clear from her reaction that this was no small infraction.  I was told that I could borrow it *only* if I called it an instrument.  So I called it an instrument, but the word “tool” clearly had great negative connotations for this instructor.  She stood up and not even looking at me went on to exclaim “Every time I hear the word tool I just think stupid person!”

Being the word geek that I am, I found this reaction fascinating.  And I got to wondering if people don’t want to use the word tool because of it’s association with carpentry, and machinery, and more laborious, blue collar kinds of work?  I know that in surgery that is part of it, but in surgery drawing that line makes a bit more sense (at least to me anyways).  But when it comes to art, or in our case creating a prosthesis, well personally I have seen straight up hardware type *tools* create beautiful art.  And while anaplastology work is certainly delicate and often requires finesse, I don’t think that it is so very different from more delicate hardware work.  So I wonder if this distinction is really just a matter of elitism.  We are often told as anaplastologists that we will have to check our artists’ egos at the door and use our artistic skills in more of a technician’s role.  Maybe this insistence on wording is one place where that ego pops back out. I’m not so sure that we should be putting such a schism between ourselves and physical laborers who build cars and houses and furniture though.  Our specialties are different, but I think that at our roots we are all physical problem solvers, and I often wonder what solutions we might find looking further outside of our own field for inspiration from other types of problem solvers.  It wasn’t long ago, a friend of mine’s brother in law who is a plastic surgeon was submitting a plan for the BP oil spill which was taken very seriously at the time which was all based on bleeding control in surgery.  We do have things to learn from one another.

Then again, it is entirely possible that my mind has wandered down this winding path over a comment that was in fact intended to call me stupid personally for repeatedly slipping up and using the wrong word, and really never carried anywhere near the weight I am reading into it.  C’est la vie.  But now that I’ve taken this little mental jaunt, I must say that I would be very interested in hearing what those of you reading think about these words.  When would you say “instrument”?  When would you say “tool”?  When would it most matter that you use one as opposed to the other and why?  Please, indulge my curiosity and fascination.

*You can leave a comment by clicking the link in the upper left hand corner of this post, just under the header.

I wasn’t crazy about my 2nd assignment, but for my 3rd I revisited those rings from the first and spruced them up a little…

Pretty neat!

I’m so excited.  Tomorrow I get to observe the surgery on which I am basing my project research.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now, so it only seemed appropriate that I post the current version of the script and storyboard I have been working on.

First, the script (click to access the PDF)…

Egner_script

And then the accompanying storyboards…

Two days ago I started a class in Maya.  I’d actually tried to take this one last year, but found the schedule didn’t agree with Gross Anatomy’s schedule, so I put it off.  Well now I have my 2nd chance.  The new teacher is requiring participation over at a Blogspot blog.  Fingers crossed that this won’t turn out to be a terrible idea posting the link here, but check it out if you would like…

http://3dspacefall2010.blogspot.com/

So far, we’ve all just posted out first assignment images.  For this one we were asked to create a simple composition using the basic shapes, or variations of them if we wanted to try some modeling, and render using an occlusion pass.  As you can see there is a pretty huge range of experience and skill levels in the class. For mine, I worked with the basic torus shape and created a composition from that.

Today I am going through a couple of the intro tutorials on Lynda.com and trying to get some good basics down.  I don’t have a copy of Maya at home yet, but the new computer I intend to install it on could be coming any minute now (oh boy!) and I do believe I should have both 3DsMax and Maya on my home machine before the semester ends.  I’m pretty excited about it.  Autodesk’s student software package makes it a really worthwhile deal.

Many of you have no doubt followed Vanessa Ruiz’s blog, Street Anatomy yourself.  But just in case you haven’t, please allow me to pass along the information that she has been putting together a show.  If you’re in the Chicago area, you may just want to give it a look.  It gets started in about a week – September 3rd!

I spent a lot of time in the clinic today and couldn’t stop looking at the pain chart and thinking of this remaking posted over at Hyperbole and a Half…

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html

Brilliant!

Well, I just managed to finish up another painting before the fall semester begins.  This is the first one I’ve ever had offers on before she was even finished.  That’s a new experience for me for sure.  I think that part of the reason for that is that the style I used for her was very clean and streamlined so you actually could see her even in just a cell phone picture.  Anyway, this one was fun to work on.  As is often the case, I was worried at first that I was pulling too much from my primary reference, a photograph found online.  But over time she started to come in to her own and take on a different feel.  I think the biggest turning point with this one was the adopting the clean line style.  I really wanted to use red, but when you try to blend red with a near white, you find yourself with pink, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.  So I started just playing with the lines, and I think it came out very well.  Anyway, here she is.

So far I’ve just been calling her Red Woman.  Anything else just feels silly.  And yeah, I like her 🙂