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San Francisco, 4:37 PM
Tue Nov 10
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/28/09
09/27/09
I don't suppose there's any chance you could turn one of these into a "death ray"?
Just askin'.
09/27/09
09/27/09
09/27/09
Well, looks like John Hammond's going to be shit out of luck if they find anything worth cloning...
09/27/09
09/27/09
09/27/09
09/27/09
That said, this article is pretty wrong on many fronts:
There are plenty of machines out there that can do it - the vast majority of them DO support only small critters (it's called microCT, and it's more common than you think, because such machines are also used for extant biological research). There's three or four of'em on my campus RIGHT NOW. The synchrotron stuff just gives you higher energies - which you don't *need* for a huge chunk of fossil research. There may be fifty or so machines in the world that are *advertised* as doing this - although I really think the number there is higher, too - but we've actually taken fossils down to our local medical, human-grade CT machine to get scanned. Worked fine.
Secondly, you can do pretty big fossils: you just have to use aircraft-grade CT scanners. Sue, the Tyrannosaurus Rex at Chicago's Field Museum got CT scanned quite some time ago (at Boeing, I believe), and Sue ain't small.
Thirdly, this isn't "promising", or cutting edge, or anything. The promise has been fulfilled - paleo's been doing this for *years*. Take a look at the DigiMorph archive ([digimorph.org]) Or, heck, either the below link, or this ( [www.youtube.com] ), which is a rendering I did for a talk at a recent paleo meeting.
09/27/09
I'm an illustrator by trade and use Modo extensively. I'd love to do some models and animations based on accurate data for once!
09/27/09
09/27/09
You need to jump through a few hoops to get them working in Modo, but it can be done; what I do will be different, because I have access to a program that you're unlikely to have, but it Can Be Done Anyway (tm).
What I did to build, say, my eoraptor was take the movie into AfterEffects and dump the movie out as a sequence of TIFFs (had to render'em out on a square background, if memory serves, but that was easy enough to do) again. Then, I knocked on my wife's door and said "Hey, honey? Can you take this stack o' TIFFs and output a .OBJ for me?" and she said "Sure," and that was that, because my wife has a copy of Amira - which is basically Photoshop-for-stacks-of-images - and Modo reads .OBJ just swell.
(slight digression time: The difficult part of all of the fossil CT stuff is, pretty much, figuring out what's bone and what's not bone: it's very hard to do automatically, because fossils can vary in density hugely. Right now, mostly what you do is use Amira or a similar tool to go through every slice of the CT dataset and tell it "THIS pixel is bone, so keep it, and THAT pixel is rock, so ignore it." It's kind of like having to paint your own Quick Mask for each one of the five hundred slices of the CT scan. It is a) tedious, but b) impossible to give to undergraduates to do because they don't know the anatomy well enough.)
If you don't have easy access to a $5000 medical imaging analysis program, then you can look into OsiriX ([www.osirix-viewer.com]) and/or Slicer ([www.slicer.org]) - I believe that those two programs, in conjunction, can be persuaded to convert the Stack O'Bitmaps into a mesh file, but I've never bothered to learn how, 'cos I have access to Amira. There are also commercial DICOM-to-mesh tools, but since they're usually bought by the medical community, they're kind of pricey.
And if you don't have that, you can do what we did before we got our hands on Amira - since the slices are evenly spaced, you can pick one every, say, fifty or so, and insert them into the 3D space as textured polygons or template images or whatever, and build around them. Worked okay. Just remember to look up a bit of head anatomy in an analogous species so you can position and scale the eyes appropriately; that's harder than it sounds.
Fair warning I: Mostly, what you'll find is small critters or heads. Small critters get CT scanned more than big ones for two reasons: first, they fit into the average scanner, and secondly, they're hella more fragile, and getting them free of the matrix is therefore Even More Fun(tm). You get a lot of heads these days because ear morphology and inside-the-cranium morphology are the current hot areas, just because they've been darn near impossible to get. You won't get a full-body CT scan of a ceratopsian, because we've got enough of them we can just break the dang things open and have a look.
Fair warning II: For the most part, the CT data sometimes isn't as handy as you might think, because there's this thing called depositional deformation, or, as Bullwinkle might say, "Them dinosaurs got squished!" A fair number of critters undergo deformation during fossilization, and you get, for instance, a skull that's been sheared laterally and squished vertically. You build your model based on that, and it's gonna look like the critter in question had a losing argument with a semi.
09/27/09
09/28/09
For my purposes detail is not so important, overall proportions are of more interest as I will be wanting to flesh them up (and guestimate where the eyes go and all the other flappy bits of course).
Squished critters are expected, I've worked from very crude point cloud data in the past.
It would be great to have that Herrerasaurus skull as an OBJ. That would make a fairly unique dino project for me.
I understand they are sheered (visible in cross sections) but how much flattening do you believe takes place? Is there a rough average?
I'd love to talk further if you'd allow. Please email me matt -at- matt-painter.co.uk
Thank you kindly. Matt
09/10/09
09/10/09
09/10/09
09/10/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
I'm afraid it'll have to be way more than 1000 years, since everything is much more durable now.
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
Here are a few galleries (a mix of personal websites and professional organisations, mostly European):
http://www.webbaviation.co.uk/aerial-archaeology/aerial-archaeology.htm
http://www.ohioarchaeology.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/aerien/en/index.html
task=view&id=233&Itemid=32
http://www.armadale.org.uk/archaeologyindex.htm#Photography
And some short introductions to aerial archaeology:
http://www.archaeologyexpert.co.uk/AerialArchaeology.html
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.1188
http://www.univie.ac.at/Luftbildarchiv/index.htm#TOC
07/30/09
07/30/09
The only way to avert the catastrophe is if we all wear pink robes ($49.95 available at my website) on the 9th of October to signify our acceptance of the Spiritual Transcosmic Convergence® as taught by the ascended Tibetan Dolphin Crystal Masters™.
IT'S BASIC SCIENCE! WAKE UP, PEOPLE!!!
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
Your ideas intrigue me sir. Praytell how if one might wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
07/30/09
07/30/09
Anyone else hoping the streets would turn out to spell UNDER ME?
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
07/30/09
Also, I would probably say undead celestial dire lion. haha nerd it up nerds.
07/30/09
Actually, I think the undying template would fit better than undead.
You can't out nerd me sir.
07/30/09
07/29/09