Stwert's BMC projects

# 1 12-03-2012 , 02:05 AM

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At this point in the master's program I'm doing, I'm now getting a chance to utilize some 3D software, and even had a chance to mess around in Maya for one course. So, I thought it would be a good idea to start a unified thread tracking the various projects I'm currently doing and will be doing next year.

For those not clear on what BMC is, it stands for biomedical communications, and pertains to any kind of visual dissemination of medical and biological information. It handily combines my two main passions, and is (in my opinion) a very interesting area of 3D work. Nilla posted a great interview article recently on one studio I think. You can check out my blog (in signature) if you want to get a more complete picture. But I ramble...

I'd like to get some more feedback from people, so I'll post work as it comes up.

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Last edited by stwert; 19-09-2012 at 01:52 PM.

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# 2 12-03-2012 , 02:09 AM

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Journal cover

One class I'm taking is teaching Cinema4D with the final project being a journal cover (a peer-reviewed journal like Nature or Cell, or more like a magazine like Scientific American). My concept is here: Journal cover concept

and here are some C4D models and a fur test

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# 3 12-03-2012 , 02:24 AM

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Surgical reference

Another class is called surgical illustration and it's really hard because the attention to detail must be ridiculously high. What thickness of suture ("thread") is used, at what angle is a scalpel held, the anatomical field must be exactly correct of course. Anyway, although it's 2D illustration, in order to get perspective and scale absolutely correct, it's recommended to model tools at least in 3D, so that's what I've been doing, although getting good reference is very difficult (if anyone has sources...).

You probably can't see anything here. I'll post something better next time. The laparascopic instruments are all very low poly, but the shapes should be pretty close (I'm hoping).

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# 4 12-03-2012 , 10:45 AM

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Some nice modelling there Stwert are you going to texture them............dave

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# 5 12-03-2012 , 11:35 AM

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Looks spooky in that light, nice mood. Surgical equipment and fur freaks me out, no slicing and dicing in 3D of the cute little rats please user added image

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# 6 12-03-2012 , 11:55 AM

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This looks like it could be a great thread...... Subscribed.

Slightly off point perhaps, but I do like the tone of the above renders.
Will any of your projects involve animation? I've possibly mentioned this to you before, but knowing about your interest in medical/biology visualization always puts me in mind of Eric Keller. His visual effects book for Maya has a good chapter on a animating a flythrough sequence of blood vessels travelling through an artery. That kind of use for Maya, using effects and dynamics to animate cells and 'stuff' in the body often looks interesting to me, but very hard.

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# 7 12-03-2012 , 12:27 PM

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Thanks all.
Dave, I will be texturing... probably procedurally for a lot of stuff, since I don't know anything about C4D's uv mapping yet, but I will have to unwrap the hamster at least (not started yet).
Nilla, no worries, the surgical instruments and the hamster are for different projects user added image

Ben, yes, I'm a big fan of Eric Keller, I've got a couple of his books, haven't worked all the way through them yet.
And I'll be changing the lighting, the test renders at top came out creepier than I intended. It was meant to be just a simple three-point setup to show the models, haha.

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# 8 16-03-2012 , 12:45 AM

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Surgical

Screenshot from my surgical setup. Final image sequence will be in pencil. Seem backwards? user added image

I should say that the skeleton was an asset provided from school, skin was exported from osirix using a freely available mri dataset. Tools and liver modelled by yours truly.
Edit: Dang, misspelled biocinematics in the watermark. How embarrassing.

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Last edited by stwert; 16-03-2012 at 12:47 AM.

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# 9 17-03-2012 , 06:49 PM

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DNA

I've got DNA elements in a couple of my ongoing projects, so it was worthwhile spending some time getting a base set of splines to work with (C4D). Here's the result. Major/minor grooves, right-handed, 10.5 bases per turn. Took forever to get the repeat working. I made a small mistake and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why things weren't lining up.

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# 10 17-03-2012 , 06:54 PM

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...e&v=VChoVZL43K

I was lookin at Dave's tank thread the other day and read how he'd used the animation snapshot technique to model the treads. I havnt used that technique before so I googled it and ended up at the above video on you tube...

might come in handy for you?

hm...broken link....

Maya: Animation snapshot - YouTube

...this might work better

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# 11 17-03-2012 , 06:57 PM

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Link's not working for me...

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# 12 21-03-2012 , 04:14 PM

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(Ah, I didn't get a notification earlier cause it wasn't a new post).
That looks good. Because the pivot is in the middle, it doesn't give a major and minor groove, so I'd have to play with it to get accurate results. I'll give it a try next time. I actually created splines based on a pdb model.

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# 13 22-03-2012 , 04:16 AM

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wow mate this is UBER cool man!!!!!!!!! I didnt see this until today....my sincere apologies for being beneath said rock of ignorance!!!!! This looks like a very nice way to combine passion and pursuit mate...subscribed now!!

cheers bullet

P.S...I need a bigger liver LOL

bullet1968

"A Darkness at Sethanon", a book I aspire to model some of the charcters and scenes

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# 14 22-03-2012 , 05:10 AM

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If you get stuck on anything in C4D let me know. At this point I can call myself knowledgeable in that app and everything I don't sculpt is made in C4D. The UV Mapping is garbage btw. I would do it in Roadkill or ZBrush. Otherwise you will have to path select the seams and front project with possible pinning to prevent overlapping. A decent free beginners resource for C4D is "greyscalegorilla." They have basic videos on quite a few things. Not professional but you get what you don't pay for...

As for the DNA I made one a while back. I made the two splines and reversed one. Then I ran an index through Xpresso and point constrained splines to match the vertex numbering of the spiral splines with user data stating the start position and to move down in the hierarchy.

Last edited by Chavfister; 22-03-2012 at 05:18 AM.

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# 15 22-03-2012 , 03:46 PM

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Thanks Bullet, really enjoying my studies, even though it's a heckuva lot of work.

Chavfister, I'll certainly take advantage of your C4D experience. Good to know that UV mapping sucks in C4D, maybe I will export to Maya and back just for that, although I'm trying to do as much as I can in C4D to learn it; we'll see how it goes.

I'm interested to learn xpresso, any really good tuts you know of? Although in my list of things to learn, that'll probably end up being years from now. Haha.