Anatomy and Art

So, this is going to have to be one of those brief posts today, but I did want to point your attention at an interesting new 3D animation out there on the human brain in orgasm.  This is neat for a number of reasons.  For one, it’s about sex, always a popular topic.  For another, it’s about brains, and lets face it, brains are awesome. People love brains almost as much as they love sex.  And lastly, the team working on this decided to start with women as their test subjects.  Health studies have long been criticized for focusing on male anatomy and often neglecting women’s health, or at best, later coming to it as an afterthought. Well, this time the data starts with the ladies.

Here is the video. And for those of you looking closely, that’s over 80 regions of the brain lighting up. The brightest yellow you see signifies the greatest use of oxygen in that area (which is how activity is being measured here). Reds signify activity but at lower levels.

The video was only just presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week, and has not yet been peer reviewed for publication.  More information on this can be found here at Time Healthland, or here at the NY Daily News, or you can go directly to the video’s initial appearance on The Visual MD’s website.

Ha!  My Sliding Filament animation broke 100,000 views on YouTube!!!
That’s so cool!

So, I was going to wait until I’d shown this in my big presentation next month, but I just couldn’t.  I put it up tonight.

Introducing, The Bilateral Sagittal Split Osteotomy and Osseous Genioplasty…

And if that doesn’t work, here’s a direct link to the YouTube page itself – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQI8L5Sxa6w

Well, it’s official.  I just submitted the new animation to the AMI for consideration at this summer’s conference.  I still haven’t uploaded it for public viewing yet, but that will come soon.  I had to trim a bit to get the piece within the AMI’s three minute time limit.  I’ll have to decide if I really like those changes or if I want to put any of that back for myself when I am not submitting under that set of rules.  That’s not a decision I have to make tonight though.

Rather, I just spent the last several hours getting all my graphics together for submission alongside the animation itself.  That was my little thumbnail image at the beginning of the post up there.  And then I have the web display image.

And lastly, one that’s more of a poster for the whole thing.

It won’t be long before I’m in Baltimore, meeting up with so many medical illustrators, and all of this will be a finished project.  I’ll even have presented for my graduation by then.  It’s all wrapping up here.

Anyway, I’ll publish the animation itself soon.  In the meantime, phew!

So I was working a little with Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro today to come up with a good looking DVD screen menu for the upcoming animation.  I’m not sure that I’m quite sold on it yet, but I don’t think it’s bad either.

The red is what the button will look like selected or clicked.  The white is what it will look like unclicked.  I don’t actually have a Spanish language version yet, but I do have an initial translation from having run all of my narration dialogue through Yahoo’s Babblefish translator online.  Unfortunately, my Spanish is so poor that I can’t tell if it’s making sense or not.  But if I can just get a few fluent Spanish speakers to look it over for me, I could at least solidify the script, and then it’s a matter of recording that new track, and laying that audio in under the animation for a 2nd version.  I would probably want to tweak the animation a little for that version just to make certain movements time to the appropriate words as they do in English, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of what I can do.  If I have to narrate it myself in Spanish it might not be the prettiest, but I still think even then it would still be worth making.  I suppose if nothing else, I could at least offer Spanish subtitles, and then no one would have to hear my American accent, but especially having read so much about the power of sight and sound combined in education, I’d hate to have people reading the text while they are watching the images and not hearing the words.  I guess I’ll just have to see what winds up being possible as it comes.

Because there will no doubt come a time when I will want to remember, and because some of you reading may also be trying to sort this one out for yourselves.  So far, the best sequence settings I have found for HD animation in Final Cut Pro have been as shown here…

That is all for now.

Feels like I’ve been spending all this time at the computer lately, but not as much time posting here.  That could just be a perception thing, but I thought I’d post another image from my animation anyways.  This is an ambient occlusion pass from my recent work.  It features the plates and screws in place for both the BSSO and osseous genioplasty procedures.

At present I am struggling with making the screws enter the bone in a reasonable manner.  They are happy to rotate all over the place, but I am having a Hell of a time getting them to simply screw in here.  The still looks nice though.  And the motion will come.

I’m actually very close to finally getting through my shot list for this animation and being able to put the finishing touches on it.  Keep your fingers crossed for me readers, I need all the luck I can get with this one.

Just working with my animation footage in After Effects this afternoon, and stumbled into this image.  Thought it was pretty cool and worth sharing.

That comes from layering the ambient occlusion pass of my shot with the skull set to multiply and 40% opacity, over the shot of the soft tissue in the same position so that it ghosts the underlying anatomy.

Pretty neat!

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Autodesk (the makers of many 3D animation softwares) must be in business with some medical arena selling carpal tunnel wrist braces and glasses.  These programs seem positively designed to make you squint and make foolish repetitive motions with your wrist.  When I had an arm in a sling for a bit a couple of years back, 3DsMax was the one program I never was able to drive left handed with any proficiency.  Left click, right click, middle mouse click and drag while holding down the option key without letting go of anything, even though you have to move further than your arm can reach with one motion.  All to reach that little tiny shape on the other side of your scene, you know, the one that you can barely see because you didn’t want it in the shot, so none of your lights are hitting it.  It’s that slightly less black bit sitting in space over there.  Yeah.  Maybe I’m just bitter because my shots have been giving me grief here lately.  But really, the more times you redo something, the more obvious the inherent flaws are.  But hey, even if this was a sign of disaster for me the other day, isn’t it still kind of pretty!

Tonight I ran my first bit of actual animation on the patient education piece!  No glitches at this point, and everything seems to be rendering quickly so far.  I’d thought I was setting myself up for doom when I put that skylight in the scene, but apparently not.  Take a look at a few frames from tonight’s test run.  That would be the slow rotation on the presurgical head which will then fade into the slow rotation of the presurgical skull.  I haven’t done anything with the background so far, and honestly I’m not sure I’ll want to do much.  I want the focus on the head, and the feeling to be uncluttered.  I also picked some background music today for the piece, so that is exciting as well.  I love it when these projects finally start to come together!