Anatomy and Art

Don’t forget – Art showing this weekend!

http://www.weburnchicago.com/

Well, I’m doing it again!  It’s time to show some paintings!

This time I’ll be showing with We Burn Chicago!  Local Chicagoans, please do come and check out some fine work from your local burners.

I’ll personally be showing these paintings and more!

Come find us at the Morning Glory Gallery at 571 W. 18th, 1R, Chicago, IL 60616!

We’ll be there Saturday, October 16th and Sunday, October 17th.

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 🙂

Here it is, my demo reel!

I cut this together using Final Cut Pro. I created the titles in After Effects. And the pieces you see are clips from the animations I have worked on here at UIC, mixed with some 3D stills, and a couple of illustrations I recently put to motion, again using After Effects.

It’s official.  We have a new medical animation!!!

Now presenting Phacoemulsification!!!

It’s funny, we’ve been working on this all semester long, but only just last night did it hit me that we really have this whole awesome animation.

You may remember previous posts about this one, in particular my work with Otis, aka Simon…
Remember Simon?

I originally wrote about him here.

Well he’s come a long way what with the wrinkles and the eyebrow fur, and the subsurface scattering.    And now he’s the Otis you see in our phacoemulsification video.

Really the whole thing has come such a long way, looking back just two months ago when we were at the animatic stage.

The eyes themselves were done by Josy Conklin, who handled most of the procedural animation along with Matt Cirigliano.  Matt also did a good deal of the compositing of those procedural shots, along wtih Eric Small, who did a lot of the special effects, shared most of the instrument modeling with Matt, and who also took on the molecular sequence in Maya.

The only modeling I really did was that of the eye speculum, and just tweaking the pre-fab head our of Poser guy into old age.  That was mostly a texturing job though.  If anything I hope I didn’t wind up toning all those wrinkles down too far for all the work that went into placing them just so.

The final bump map went something like this…

And the final color map like this…

I had to do a lot of tweaking right around the eyes to avoid distortion with as close as we came in with the camera in 3DsMax.  This would be the part where I started using a lot of my house guest’s skin texture in high res photographs to pump up our resolution, while maintaining a blend of aged skin images in the surrounding eye area wherever possible…

There wound up being three main After Effects renders which were then compiled using Premiere.  Matt and I are really the most sound effect obsessed, so after compiling our various renders, he and I tackled sound, and also tag teamed on the various titles needed.

All in all, I think the project is a big success.  Our instructor suggested this morning that we submit the piece to this summer’s AMI annual meeting in Portland.  I think we will.

This week I finally finished the 3D animation that I have been working on this semester. It’s subject is the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction and I believe that I have managed to put together something clear.

I find that I still struggle in places with 3DsMax, but learning After Effects and coming back to working in Final Cut Pro again was a lot of fun. Our class on the whole created some really great work.

Before I moved to Chicago, one of my favorite sculpting exercises was to sculpt little skulls. This week we finally moved on to the head and neck portion of gross anatomy, and the first thing I did was pull out the skull we got from the class and and few pictures from my textbook and start sculpting again.

The skull I had in hand wasn’t in too good of shape, so I wound up trying my hand at a skull without a mandible for a change. This wound up being fun, because I wound up paying much more attention to all the little foramen and structures on the base of the skull than I normally would. There are so many little nooks and crannies.

It’s far from perfect, but a good exercise nonetheless. And who knows, one of these days I might just get good at this.

I recently managed to knock another painting out.  This isn’t anything medical.  In fact it’s my first time doing a celebrity likeness.  The really fun thing about doing a celebrity likeness is when people start to be able to tell who it is you’re painting without you telling them.  But I won’t play that game here.  This is my painting of Tom Waits, and I just signed it this morning.

I’ve been working on this piece for a while now.  And I just finished it!!!

This image represents the pathway into our first cranial nerve, the olfactory nerve.  It begins with the olfactory vessicles in the foreground, and follows the signal’s path through the neuroepithelium and lamina propria, on to the skull’s cribiform plate.

For those of you unfamiliar with this part of anatomy, I’m talking about this area in here…

My favorite photo references for this piece came from Kessel’s work for the book “Tissues and Organs: A Text-Atlas of Scanning Electron Microscopy…”

I also found this amazing photo online of nasal mucosa, unfortunately without reference to who the photographer was…

Kessel also had some good line drawings, but my absolute favorite drawn references came from R.V. Krstic’s book, “Human Microscopic Anatomy…”

And then there are lots of examples online of epithelial cells, and how they fit together in a sliced plane…

Part of the process on this one that was interesting, was being able to take exact measurements from Krstic’s work, and line up an exact reference in 3D Studio Max.  This project was a class assignment, and part of the project was to use both 3D modeling software as well as Photoshop to get a better feel for the strengths and weaknesses of both 2D and 3D mediums.  This allowed for a lot of cross pollination of ideas and problem solving.

Initially I just used rectangles, representing the exact measurements of the different layers involved in the scene (ie, the neuroepithelium, the lamina propria, the basement membrane, the cribiform plate).  Then because 3DsMax is a 3D program, I could turn the image any way I wanted to get the best possible view.

From there I was able to get a good sketch.  And then, since I was also developing a 3D image at the same time, that sketch was then helpful in further cultivating what I would model there.  Having a folder of references, I went ahead and made temporary textures for the modeled pieces once they were created, and arranged my view to suit the 2D image I was working towards.  Then with a print out of that, I had the perfect reference to use for my final sketch.

From that point, it was a matter of building up the Photoshop painting around it.  Our class had even already done some work with color schemes, so a lot of that was able to be referenced throughout the process.  This turned out to be an especially good thing for me, when I got sick halfway through putting this together and had to put it on hold for a while.  Having so many references and decisions pre-made turned out to be very helpful in getting myself back into something I hadn’t touched in a while.

I will post the finished 3DsMax image when it is finished as well.

I suppose that this is the first I’ve really mentioned here that I paint, but I’ve just finished a new painting and it seems appropriate that I should post it here.

The figure was largely referenced from a Saudek piece.  The rest of it is just me playing around.  The different thing for me with this one was that it utilizes two different styles within the same piece.  At first I wasn’t sure I liked the effect, but the look is growing on me.  I may have to experiment with the idea more.