ROM rant

Well it's been a while since I ranted about anything, so this goes out to the anatomists or physiotherapists or anyone else that follows the nonsensical pattern of rotational axis naming.

First off, there are a few planes that the body can get divided by:
Frontal plane or coronal plane, which is like cutting you down from top to bottom so your face falls off, or rather divides you into a front and a back.
Next up is a transverse or horizontal plane, which, for example, could cut horizontally so you have a top and a bottom half. Incidentally, guillotines do this.
And finally there is a sagittal plane, which cuts to divide left from right, like if you straddled and then fell and sat on a running chainsaw (that's never almost happened to anybody I know *cough*).

If you're still unclear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_anatomy_planes.svg

So that's all fine, I buy that, it's helpful and reasonable.

Now, someone got it into their head that since some body joints allow motion, we need to describe the motion of the bones and joints in terms of the axes that they rotate around. That's fine too, a shaking head indicating "no" is one example. A straight leg kicking a ball rotates around another axis, and bringing your arm straight out from your side to the left is the third axis. And these axes need names apparently and THIS is where all mathematical reason is discarded.

I'll just say what they are named and then I'll explain why it is just wrong. The frontal axis passes through the body from left to right (like a pencil passed through your ear holes - apologies for the graphic examples, but it's hard to describe planes and axes without describing things passing through the body). The sagittal axis passes through the body from front to back (like when someone pokes you in the chest with their index finger - there, nice and harmless). The final axis comes up with a new word and calls it the longitudinal axis, which when you shake your head "no" is what the head is rotating around (an axis passing from top to bottom). And movement examples of the frontal axis and the sagittal axis would be kicking a ball and lifting your arm out from your side, respectively. Confused? Yeah, and it's totally not my fault. What were they thinking?

Okay, I'll start with the most basic and logical argument against this nonsense naming. An axis exists in ONE dimension. A plane exists in TWO dimensions. ERGO, there are TWO axes that run parallel to a plane, and ONE axis that runs perpendicular to a plane. So, it is NOT possible to unambiguously name an axis after a plane UNLESS that axis runs perpendicular to the plane and NOT parallel to it, which is the case here. According to these preposterous naming conventions, the sagittal axis actually runs parallel to BOTH the sagittal plane AND the transverse plane. The frontal axis runs parallel to the frontal plane AND the transverse plane. The longitudinal axis runs parallel to both the sagittal and frontal planes. Okay, so there's no transverse axis, so theoretically you can't get confused, IF you remember which one the longitudinal axis is, but it still doesn't make sense and it does my head in.

I am forced to think in this manner: Abduction of the arm is rotating around an axis. It is not the longitudinal axis, so it must be either the sagittal or frontal axis. The axis runs parallel to both the coronal and transverse planes. There is neither a coronal nor transverse plane, but the coronal is also known as the frontal, so it must be rotating around the frontal axis. Was I right? Not 100% sure. No, I looked at it again and I'm wrong. Abduction of the arm is rotating around an axis parallel to the transverse and sagittal planes. Ergo sagittal.

I will defer to a mathematical example. If you have a cube that sits in XYZ space, you can take that cube and move it in the XY plane. You can move it in the YZ plane, and also the XZ plane. You can also rotate the cube around each of the X, Y, and Z axes. NOTICE that if you are rotating.... ah never mind. I'm too tired for this.


/rant


"/rant" is an internet typing to signify the end of a rant. It's derived from XML as far as I can work out, where any element is terminated by a forward slash followed by the name of the element (in this case the rant) and enclosed in , but I guess were deemed unnecessary for the /rant version.


Have a good week!

Stuart

P.S. ROM stands for Range of Movement, which is apparently what this stuff is used for.

First Medical Illustration

Well here 'tis, my first bit of medical illustration, for the textbook illustration part of the anatomy course I'm taking at the moment.

It's a (mostly) linear sketch of a saggital section of someone's head. I hope that's self-evident. The bulk of it was drawn from a (slightly distorted) dissected specimen though a lot of the brain bits were taken from a real textbook illustration, cause that section was mostly uninterpretable (mushy) in the real specimen. Unfortunately we haven't learned the head part of the anatomy yet, so some of it is a bit foreign to me and hopefully it's not incorrect (through distortion or misinterpretation) in the drawing.

This textbook illustration is the extra graduate component of the anatomy course we get to take. So yes, I'm only taking one course at the moment. However, looking at the schedule for the coming week, there's 25 hours of course (sing.) scheduled, which isn't including the hours (and hours) of studying, prep, and drawing that will need to be done. But I enjoy it, especially the drawing and the embryology. The radiology I keep nearly falling asleep in, mostly cause it's on Friday afternoons.

And I've learned that eventually we'll be doing surgical illustration... yes, in an OR. I think.

(still working on the alien review/tutorial)

Later,
Stuart

After the Rain

I forgot to post this before I left Victoria, so here's the final painting I did for my art lessons. Actually the first canvas I did too, and I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out. Hope you like it.

I know it's not the best presentation (in terms of the hasty background and crop) but hopefully it gets the point across. The weird wigglies you can see in the sky and the road are an artifact of the texture of the canvas upon digital resizing. It goes away if you click for larger.

The long-memoried readers might recall this post: http://biocinematics.blogspot.com/2011/03/walking-into-storm.html

Yay, it's Friday.

Later,
Stuart

Logitech and Luteinizing Hormone

So, since I was just studying some embryology at the moment, of course I'm going to start a blog post.

First off, I learned a new internet abbreviation. TL;DR - too long; didn't read. That can be used by someone who thought some bit of text was too long and decided it wasn't worth reading. Or it can be used by the author as a disclaimer and is often followed by a summary for those who don't want to read. If you find my blog too verbose, that's fine, your unspoken protest of not reading doesn't bother me; if you write TL;DR in the comments, I'll just assume you didn't finish high school. If you want me to write TL;DR here and then summarize the below, tough. Here's a picture for you:

That's special. (The mushroom represents you in a world where words are too many.)

So now for the text:

I'm into the second week of classes, and the pressure of the information fire hose seems to be backing off a bit, or at least I'm getting more acclimatized to it. I've had some pretty intense experiences so far, with dissection and trauma images... but it's also intriguing and rewarding, when a structure looks the same in situ as it does on the page, or when I'm able to recall a vessel learned last week that relates to a new region of study.

I'm learning to read x-rays (a practical skill in the future? who knows?) and I'm getting a crash course in embryology as I said, which is a ton of new info, worth a grand total of 5% of the mark for this course. The student part of me says, "That's really not worth as much time as it's asking to be invested". The student part of me says, "This is amazing stuff. I'm going to learn as much of the developmental process as I possibly can."

Ummm, but other than the studying, oh yeah lynda and logitech. I'll start with logitech. About, oh, five years ago, I bought a Logitech MX Revolution laser wireless mouse. It's pretty much awesome. So upon moving to Toronto and finding that I couldn't find the USB wireless receiver, I was fair mortified. The mouse survived the move fine, but without the little plastic bit that sticks in the computer, it's useless. In the meantime, I've been using the mouse that came with my Wacom tablet, which is okay, but a bit like using a twig to brush your teeth. I thought about just buying a new mouse, but I really like the MX Revolution, and Logitech doesn't sell it anymore. I looked up replacement receivers, and you can get them for 10 bucks from Logitech, but only if you live in the states. I looked on ebay, but the cheapest was 25-30 bucks including shipping and tax and all, and that's just a bit steep for an imperative bit of plastic and no guarantees it'll work. A google search pointed me to someone who pointed me to the Logitech customer service phone number. I phoned them (yes this story is going somewhere). After a long hold wait (typical) the customer service rep (hereafter referred to as the CSR) told me that my mouse was out of warranty (what? after 5 years?) and that he could send me a free receiver (atypical). So... that's in the mail. Wut wuut.

Alright, for the above paragraph only: TL;DR: I got a free mouse usb thingy.

And... lynda.com is like digital-tutors or simplymaya.com (I'm not sponsored by anyone, so I can freely name competitor sites consecutively) except their maya tutorials are not as extensive as DT or SM, but they have a much much broader base of video tutorials, for software like sketchbook pro, cinema4D, illustrator, flash, premier, after effects, photoshop, facebook, and google. I won't watch the facebook tutorials, it might make me depressed. Umm, so, what about it? Well it so happens that part of my tuition goes towards unlimited premium continual access to all their tutorials. That is so very great. I've already made a long list of the tutorials I want to watch, uppermost in them sketchbook pro (got started on that), cinema 4D (cause my demo trial is ticking away), and illustrator (cause I haven't got a very good foundation in that one yet).

And... simplymaya have generously given me the opportunity to review another of their video tutorials. (See, I can accommodate multiple sources of great digital training) It's only 10 hours long, so I should be able to bang out a review in... a matter of hours. Many hours. Stay tuned for that, simplymaya readers (*crickets*).

Now, let's see, what else has been a-happening. I think that's about it for now; I'd better get back to the embryology. Did you know that the heart starts out as a single tube (essentially a blood vessel) that folds and twists and fuses and grows holes?

Ah, you made it to the bottom. For all the non-TL;DR types out there, here's a different picture:

Aw, a kitty. You can conquer the most intimidating body of text, or the side of a sofa.

Later,
Stuart

Scoutin' on Sculptris

So despite the fact that I've got 5 hours of dissection tomorrow, I figured I could take a bit of time this evening and try to get a bit more familiar with the sculptris program. I have to say that it's a very fun program and not very hard to get to grips with. If you've never done any 3D computer stuff, I might dare say this may be the program to start off with. It's got about 9 tools, and a handful of options (brush size, strength) and that's about all you have to deal with. This was my first attempt in an hour or two. You might recognize it as the scout from Team Fortress 2.

It's also got a painting module, but I haven't given that a try yet. Maybe tomorrow after I've had my first go at real dissection (yikes...).

I also got 25 likes on facebook, which means that I can reserve the URL and you can now find biocinematics at facebook.com/biocinematics.

This first week has been pretty tiring so far and only ~half done. Phew.

Later,
Stuart

Baseball and costodiaphragmatic recesses

First day of classes done! Five hours of intensive gross anatomy, and I can't really remember terribly much of it at the moment (I had to look up a long name because I couldn't think of any off the top of my head). Actually, I learned a pile today, it'll just take a bit of refreshing to bring it back to the surface. Fairly overwhelming.

But the weekend was fun. Went to a Blue Jays game, which was fun (they lost 12-zip and there was lots of humorous heckling). We also took a trip up the CN tower (until 2009, the tallest freestanding structure in the world... now fifth), and checked out our apartment from the top. There it is!

And what else... I've been playing around with Sculptris too, which is a simpler type version of zbrush or mudbox (bought by pixologic who make zbrush). I like it a lot better than either z or mudbox so far, so I think I'll mess around and see what I can do with it. Hopefully my next post will include some CG, since it's been quite a while. I think this anatomy will be quite the workload, but I'm still clinging to the hope that I'll be able to do some CG concurrently.

Thanks for reading.
Later,
Stuart

Moving In

Here I am writing from my computer in our new apartment in Toronto...
I got my internets installed yesterday morning, during which the technician spent over an hour going through the [insert ISP here]'s customer service departments over the phone, trying to get a modem authorized for me. At least employee's aren't exempt from the kind of pain those customer service rep's put people through. Anyway, it seems to be working okay right now.

But backing up, a lot's happened in the past several weeks. I was working on that blood vessel animation, and then I realized that I was going to have to pack up my computer until I could get I moved to Toronto, so that's been on hold for obvious reasons. So, I carefully unplugged and labelled all my cables (quick moving tip: you may know to which device all your power cables and other connectors belong to, but it makes things so much faster and easier to put a twist tie around the neatly coiled cable and a simple masking tape label; you're welcome) and spent a long time putting bubble wrap, packing tape, pillows, underwear, and other cushioning materials around my precious computer and monitors. Then I labeled the box FRAGILE all over and the movers came and put everything in a big truck.

So after a few frantic days of packing and cleaning, I got to take some great holiday time at the family cabin. It's the kind of place where there's enough amenities to be really comfortable (running water; toilets that takes your waste a good distance away; grandmothers that really know how to make good food, and nearby concessions that sell nerds and ring pops) but you're far enough away from civilization that you can't hear highways, you can stumble across fantastical toxic mushrooms that no one has either eaten or stepped on yet, and you can go for a swim within 3 minutes of deciding that you want one. Previous to this past visit, I hadn't been there for about 6 years, so it was great to have that time.

In the back of my mind I've always been thinking about preparing more for school, and I've done a number of sketches, mostly focusing on the human figure since that's still somewhat of a weak point for me, and I'm anticipating being required to do some of that this fall (maybe?). I won't post any of those sketches right now, maybe in the future. I've been sort of working through "The Drawing Book" by somebody Blake, which I've found to be really helpful and interesting. There's good instruction and examples, especially for portraiture and figure drawing.

But back to "what I did this summer" (or whatever this post is titled), I travelled back to Victoria and spent some time tying up loose ends and "helping" my wife successfully defend her Master's Thesis in Genetics on Recombinant Expression of N-acetylglucosaminidase (no I didn't have to look that up, yes I paid attention to what she was working on, no I'm not sure if I spelled it right). Yay!

And then we flew to Toronto! Yay! And got the keys to our apartment! Yay! And then we realized that it was really not clean! Yay! So we've spent the last week cleaning first and unpacking second and finding new and used furniture third (but all intermingled too), including a 90 pound desk that we carried home on the subway. Yeah, that was fun... not really. But it's a pretty nice desk, large enough for both my monitors and my printer and scanner and DAC and modem/router and even a shelf above for my speakers and reference books. I might post a picture of my setup on facebook. Whee. Oh yeah, and the other fun thing we did today was dumpster dive for bookshelves. Not joking.

Let me relay the story. So my wife and I found a nice bookshelf on some website that does used items, craigslist or one of those, and it was just a block and a half away and the dimensions were just right. So we went over to the listed second story apartment, thinking we could carry it home together. It turned out to be nice and tall and what we were looking for, but it was really heavy. We paid for it, and decided to carry the removable shelves down to the main floor and come back up for the main shelving unit. I put them in between the double set of doors, inside the building, out of sight of the street, but not behind the locking doors so we could get them without calling up again in case we let ourselves get locked out. Sounds good, right? I went back up, and we came down with the shelving unit not more than two minutes later. The shelves were gone. It was a stomach sinking moment. I went outside and looked left,  right, and even in one of the garbage units in front of the building for the vanished shelves. I couldn't see any culprits. Who steals particle board shelves? At this point, my wife noticed that a stack of mail that was left beside the apartment mailboxes was also gone. Someone stole mail and our shelves? It seemed weird. After some phoning about, we managed to find out that the superintendent of the building had thrown the shelves into the third garbage bin in front of the building. Again, the shelves were there for less than three minutes max. Anyway, I located the shelves, did some quick risk analysis, and fished them out. They look pretty nice sitting over there in the corner, but after two or three chemical washes and a rinse or two, I'll still understand if you don't want to borrow any books from me. I won't elaborate on the other contents of the garbage, so I'll end the story here. I hope our misfortune has afforded you at least some entertainment.

Let's see... oh of course. Once I connected panel 6 to mid-support 13 using screws 57 and 48, I started getting my computer system set up on my nice new desk (yes, new, straight from a factory in south-east asia). The labeled cables were very helpful, and I manged to get everything together without too much trouble (except I still can't find the wireless dongle for my mouse, so I'm stuck using the mouse that came with my tablet for now... where can it have gone?). Not too much trouble that is, (using another exception because there were in fact multiple exceptions to the "not too much trouble") except for my rather expensive, and rather necessary for much work, much communication, and other entertainment and hobby type things I plan on doing. Wait, that wasn't a complete sentence. Except for my COMPUTER!! The one that was labeled fragile? The movers did this to the box:

And inside the box, they managed to do this to the case:

The pictures aren't really in focus, but in this last one, you can see the steel side of the case is totally warped and bent off the tabs holding it on. In the second pic, the other side of the case, the top part of the side of the case is about 1 cm off the back, with the screw still embedded. I couldn't put the screw back on after I opened it up.

Keep in mind, this was surrounded by the inch-sized-bubble bubble wrap and pillows on either side, and other quilts and clothes and oh yeah underwear. This case was made by Lian Li, which, if you'll care to do a small amount of research and find out, build somewhat high-end, rather sturdy construction cases. In truth, I'm not all that concerned about the case, but the only I could think that would warp the whole case and knock all the front covers askew is a massive shock, which I don't need to tell you wouldn't bode well for the internals.

Did I back up my computer before the move? Yeah, of course, and I left the backup drive in Victoria. Oh no, wait, it's somehow appeared in another box. Hmmm... I really hope that box didn't get dropped off the back of the truck too (just guessing here). So, with a small amount of trepidation, I booted up my compy... and everything went as hoped! Apparently the Lian Li cases have rubber grommets that hold the hard drives for anti-vibration, so maybe that helped with whatever shocks were subjected to it. All's well that ends well, but can I say, if you want to move across canada, do not use Across Canada Van Lines Inc. They were terrible in basically every single interaction we had with them (and there were a lot of phone calls and emails). We're still trying to file a claim for damaged furniture and also get a receipt for what we paid.

Anyway, that's probably enough about me and my moving escapades.
I've got orientation on Thursday; very much looking forward to it. I'll post about how that goes.

Later,
Stuart

Blood vessels

I started working on a smallish project. According to Eric Keller, every animator has to do a blood cell animation at some point in time, so this is my shot at it. I'm practicing up on some dynamics. The density isn't right yet. I'm not sure how accurate I want to get the biology, since that will probably result in millions upon millions of RBCs. I'll do some calculations, figure out what kind of vessel this will be, and go from there.

The geometry is very simple. I tried to add some randomness to the vessel and the red blood cells. I'm also using procedural textures to see how realistic I can get with ramps and noise.

I haven't touched the lighting yet; that will make a big difference. Eventually I think I'll have a large WBC travelling through and the camera will track on that. Nothing too original, but like I quoted above, everybody's gotta do one ;)

Later,
Stuart

A whirlwind trip and reader input!

I think a small update post is necessary. It's Sunday, and tomorrow will be my first real day off work. For the past three years, I've been working as a bioinformatician at the University of Victoria. Some of the research I've been involved in you can find here. I was happy to hear that another manuscript I co-primary-authored was just accepted. As great as this work experience has been, what with the massive number of things I've learned and the great people I've been able to collaborate with, I'm now looking ahead to the future.

Last week I got on a flight to Toronto to undertake the stressful and challenging task of finding a place to live for August. After looking at a number of places (with ceilings shorter than me, a sketchy neighborhood, a building with no laundry, etc.), on day 2 of 3 I found an apartment in a great location, for not too much money (still small and expensive), and squeaked in an application through high demand. I also got my student card, and wandered around the amazing UofT St. George's campus. I'm so looking forward to studying there. It will be an experience and a half.
This week, amongst the organizing and packing, I'm hoping to put some full days of CG and drawing. Of course I will have plenty of opportunity to do the practicing while I'm in the program, but I want to get as far as I can in these moments of "free time".

So... this is the interactive portion. Along with tutorials and that sort of thing, I want to produce another ~30 second short this summer. What should it be about? I'd like to hear some ideas. Anything will do... toss out some ideas. I've got loads of ideas jotted down, enough to keep me busy for years to come, but I thought it would be fun to have reader input. Rules: 30 seconds means it can't be an epic feature length saga. Write your ca-razy ideas (a phrase, a theme, a premise, whatever) on my facebook page or in the comments here, or tweet @biocinematics. If there's enough ideas, I may put a poll up, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Later,
Stuart

June sketches 05

It seems to be July now, so Happy Canada Day everyone. A couple final sketches I thought I'd share:

 This is a campfire off a photo; I found it pretty tricky to sketch flame... it's not a simple form, even to get the impression.

And this creature head's obviously from my imagination; I just kept adding features as I went. Kind of an interesting result.

So looking back on the month: 25 pencil sketches, 2 maya "sketches", and a zbrush doodle... totalling 28 sketches in a month of 30 days. Not too bad, considering there were also 4 graduations, a wedding, and a funeral... and a week and a half of a nasty virus or something.

So what's up for July? Well, I have to find a place to live in Toronto, pack up and move; I'm finishing up at my job of 3 years; I'm going to be spending some time relaxing and holidaying with family; but I'm hoping to have some solid full days of learning more Maya and also brushing up on some anatomy and the human form before my program starts in late August.

You can keep tabs on me on twitter or facebook or here, and feel free to comment here or on my facebook wall.

Later,

Stuart