Anatomy and Art

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.

Yesterday morning I did my first surgical observation.  The four of us taking Animation II this semester decided to go in and witness first hand a cataract surgery in preparation for the animation we are creating.  It was pretty amazing.  There was a lot of prep and making sure that everything was in order.  The patient was nerve blocked, but fully conscious the entire time.  I couldn’t help wondering what that all could possibly have looked like from his perspective.  All in all, I think the surgery went on about an hour.  They used a Leica system for viewing.  I had the opportunity to look through the lens myself, and you can really see just amazing detail through the microscope.  After the lens was emulsified, vacuumed out, and replaced, they used tiny stitches to close the incisions, and wrapped the eye in gauze.  When they were done, the patient just said “thank you” and they wheeled him out.  We wanted to ask the patient about his experience, but he was taken away too quickly.  So last night I called my grandmother, who has been through the same surgery herself.  In her case, she said she was given some kind of sedative, though she was awake.  As for her view of the procedure while being worked on, she described it as mostly a blur of twinkling lights.  I can’t say as I’m anxious to be the one on the table any time soon, but it was fascinating to witness surgery from the OR like that.

*image is taken from Karkhanis Super Specialty Hospital