thesmellofscience

[thesmellofscience]

I present to you a colorful and vivid interpretation of gut flora of the small intestine, featuring E. Coli and a Ruminococcus bacteria. Both of these models were sculpted in Z-brush, as well as the microvilli you see in the foreground. The microvilli in the background were created using a hair and fur modifier in 3ds Max. All of these components were composited in Adobe Photoshop.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for this project were the microvilli, a seemingly odd thing to be concerned about, since they were not intended to be the focus of the piece. However, it’s the microvilli that contribute so much of the atmosphere and give you an anatomical reference for where this scene takes place, I wanted to make sure they were not glossed over. Thus, I created rolling hills of microvilli as far as the eye can see.

[thesmellofscience]

Go ahead and take a look at the higher-res version: it's worth it!

This is a 3D model of a hand I sculpted in ZBrush as one of my four big ZBrush projects this semester. I'm doing this as an independent study because I really want to learn some of the details of working such an incredible program. For this project, I wanted to master subsurface scattering to get that nice, healthy skin glow. I also challenged myself to use rigging to pose the hand model on the left into the one you see on the right. Same model, different pose. The last detail I wanted to add was fibermesh to give the arm a little scattering of hair for realism.

The rest of the composite was done in Adobe Photoshop.

Look forward to more ZBrush experiments from me!

[thesmellofscience]

I have something a little different for you all today!

For a class, we were tasked with doing a character sculpt to help us solidify everything we had learned in Z-brush. People took many different directions and inspirations, but no one else did quite what I did: I took my inspiration from 'bog people,' or 'bog bodies.' I've always found the mystery of these well-preserved mummies to be fascinating, as I've also been fascinated by mythology. So I decided to draw the two together by creating Gønde.

He is a creature inspired by the Celtic god Cernunnos, who is thought to be portrayed on the beautiful Gundestrup Cauldron (which I had the pleasure of seeing when I was living in Denmark). In the past when he was worshipped as a god, Gønde would demand sacrifices to his many bogs, which was how all those mummies came to be. As the centuries saw him fading away into obscurity, he remained in the bogs to keep watch over his many sacrifices. However, in the last couple hundred years, people have been digging up his mummies and transporting them out of the bogs to be put on display in museums. Displeased with having his trophies stolen, Gønde will venture out of his bogs to find the people responsible. And then he will just sit in the shadows of their home to watch and wait. Although he's not violent, he sure knows how to get his point across!

I had so much fun sculpting this. I wanted to incorporate the texture and color of the mummified flesh into his limbs to tie him to the bog people he watches over. I also drew a lot of his form from this particular plate in the Gundestrup Cauldron to tie him to a nature god mythology.

To be honest, I think he's kind of cute! No one else seems to think so.

[thesmellofscience]

This assignment was an endeavor to accurately illustrate a cross section of an eye. Eye anatomy is extremely precise and the complexity is often overlooked when people are drawing it, resulting in a slew of some pretty poorly illustrated eyes. Here is my attempt at a good representation of the human eye.

[thesmellofscience]

I'm learning Z-brush! It's a fantastic program that really allows me to sculpt exactly what I'm envisioning.

Here you can see the final render and composite of a goat fetus I sculpted. This little guy was so fun to make. And dare I say he's extraordinarily cute?

I used many, many z-spheres in order to orient his limbs in space so that he looked natural and comfortable in his environment. That's one of the many tools in Z-brush that I'm enjoying. Of course, I had just as much fun adding in all the effects afterwards with Photoshop. What a fun work flow!

[thesmellofscience]

In an unusual flurry of activity, I have another project to post here. This was perhaps the most interesting assignment I've done all semester and I think the process is worth writing about.

First of all, I would like to announce that this project was done for the National Museum of Heath and Medicine Chicago using their Visible Human Male data set. Sometime in the future, this will be displayed in the museum alongside my classmates' projects. It's a very exciting amount of exposure to have.

The data was provided to us from the Visible Human Male data set where the cadaver had been cryosectioned at 1mm thickness (which is actually pretty thick!). In Materialise Mimics, parts of these sections could be masked out to capture the pancreas alone so it could be exported into another program for manipulation. The resulting model of the pancreas in particular was a little difficult to interpret, as you can see:

I was hopeful that it would look more like a pancreas after I'd retopologized it in 3ds Max. Retopologizing this model means re-drawing all of the squares (or polygons) that make up the shape of the object. So far, we've only learned how to do it manually, though I suspect there's an easier way to do it and we're having to learn the basics first. My hand hurt afterwards, but this was the cleaned up result:

But it still doesn't look much like a pancreas. Many of the organs from the Visible Human Male did, indeed, look like the organs they were supposed to be! The pancreas just decided to be special in this case, perhaps because the glandular nature of it is somewhat irregular in real life, as opposed to the idealized anatomical perfection which is how we're used to seeing the pancreas represented.

So because I lacked the scaffolding of a realistic, idealized pancreas, I knew I would need to look at a lot of references. I've only ever seen dead, preserved human pancreases, and I knew that a living one wouldn't look that way I knew them to be. The trouble was, it's very difficult finding references of this particular organ. Many of the surgical journals I hoarded had pictures of pathological pancreases with only little segments of the organ that didn't look sick or dead. So finding references was a big struggle, but I got some help from a friend who pointed me in the right direction with allowed me to start sculpting and painting in Mudbox:

All of that texturing? That was done by hand. As you can imagine, my hand hurt quite a bit after that.

The paint, texture, and sculpt was then brought back into 3ds Max where it was lit and given some nice reflectivity to give it a slick feel. The final stage was Photoshop compositing.

I received so much kind and encouraging feedback during my critique. I'm terribly proud of what I accomplished, moreso with any other project this semester. I hope to be doing more of this kind of work in the future!

[thesmellofscience]

To practice color theory, we created a color copy of a tonal Tom Jones work. I used Adobe Photoshop with just a tad of Corel Painter just to spice things up.

Overall, I enjoy the color scheme I used. It's informative (the arteries are red, the veins are blue, the muscle is red, just as you expect in textbooks), but I also think it transcends just being a color-labeled image because I tried to play with some neat reflected light and tried to be crafty about my color choices.

[thesmellofscience]

I'm excited to present to you my first 3D modeling assignment, sculpted and rendered in Autodesk Mudbox and Autodesk 3ds Max with the final composite done in Adobe Photoshop. I wanted to do a scene capturing the moment where a cell undergoing apotosis is being phagocytized by a macrophage. I managed to have quite a lot of fun figuring out how to construct wild pseudopodia and a blebby apototic cell dressed in a toxic green.

Most of the models were done in Mudbox, because I wanted a really nice, organic feel that I wasn't sure 3ds Max would be able to give me. But after going through the process, I'm confident I could have done a similar mesh in 3ds Max by playing with some unique maps and materials. Something to note for next time.

There are a few tweaks here and there that were suggested; I will probably go and touch those things up before the end of the semester, but I'm very happy with what I achieved. Learning how to do 3D modeling, lighting, compositing, and sculpting at a competent level in basically 10 weeks is quite an accomplishment, I think! This is only the beginning!

[thesmellofscience]

It's unfortunate that I haven't been giving you many updates in the 3D work I've been completing this semester. I'm trying to remedy this by giving you a glimpse into some of the exercises I've completed. The first image was rendered in 3ds Max and composited in Photoshop. The second image is just a screenshot of a headsculpt I did in Mudbox, using the inspiration of Doug Jones' Abe Sapien.

I've enjoyed my improvement in the world of 3D modeling and rendering greatly. More to come!

[thesmellofscience]

Instructional Learning

It's been a lot of work the last few weeks, but not a lot I have to show you. I'll probably be uploading some of my 3D modeling exercises soon just to show you the process of my learning the programs. But until then, let me share with you my latest Illustrator creation.

The assignment was to create a 8.5" x 11" handout of a procedure that could be given to students at the Graham Clinical Performance Center at UIC. It was really fun for them to have our class in the clinic, demonstrating a variety of procedures for us to take notes on and pictures of for reference. And, boy, did I use a lot of references. Pictures and Youtube videos became my go-to for this project, because I am not familiar with any of these tools.

While the organic forms were easy to manipulate with the pencil and width tool, I found the clean, pristine lines needed to create the tool drills and needles to be a challenge. It became one of those 'I know what I want this to look like, but how do I get there?' challenges.

[thesmellofscience]

This is my first actual modeled and lit scene I created in 3ds Max. It's an awesome program. Once you learn the basics of what it can do, you can spend hours just experimenting with the millions of different options. It's a playground. So far, I've learned how to model object using several different techniques, how to edit them, how to give add materials to them, and how to light them. I'd say I've learned a lot in just a few weeks!

My next project in this program is going to be really engaging, I think. It's going to be so much bigger in scale, and I can't wait to start working on it.

[thesmellofscience]

Large Intestine Final Line

I'm very pleased to share with you all the final line rendering of this large intestine I've been working on. Since this was the fist time I've ever tried to do linework like this, it was definitely challenging, especially in ways I did not anticipate. For example, I had about 3 false starts in Photoshop when I was trying to determine how thick to make the brush for my lines. I started working at 10 pt, then 15 pt, and finally settled on a 20 pt brush after re-doing the ileum and cecum again and again to see how each size looked. Those things do matter, especially since this image is intended to be printed for the purpose of our assignments.

[thesmellofscience]

The Art of Editing

My most recent project focuses on learning how to use line to create form. As a person who works tonally, I find myself having a difficult time wrapping my head around some of these techniques. The sad part is, I haven't even started working on the line aspect of my drawing yet! I've been through so many edits and re-draws of this large intestine. I kind of just wanted to take you on a tour of the process of getting to a stage where the initial drawing is good enough to even start working on it in line.

Here is my very rough initial jotting:

At this stage, I was focused on accuracy. I wanted to get the overall shape of the large intestine down, as well as accurate proportions. For this, I used Grey's Anatomy (because that book has measurements of everything and it's simply darling) and created a ruler of my own. I had to scale it to fit on my page, so the 'unit' I used to measure it was fairly arbitrary: I only needed it to check proportions, not actual size, if that makes any sense.

Since the shapes were all blocked out, I went ahead and did a more detailed sketch:

Here I started to figure out how many haustra (those little sacculated pouches) I wanted on each section of the colon. It's still kind of loose and messy, just trying to find where the forms are most happy laying. It was a challenge trying to make the haustra a more or less uniform size without getting too tight and balloon-like with it. I made a stencil with the intent of using it to make each haustra look the same, but I eventually ditched that idea. It made them look more like they were made out of plastic than human tissue! You can probably tell where I was experimenting with it and you can probably see that it looks really forced.

I brought in a moderately detailed sketch for my professor to look over. I used tone to determine where I wanted my light source to be with the intent of trying to 'interpret' it in line once I got to that stage. But here we run into some major problems!

Accuracy is key when doing medical illustrations. And unfortunately, despite the fact that I used many, many resources, my critique alerted me to the fact that I had failed in a few areas of the drawing. The appendix looked too much like a little tab and needed to be coming out more with 'character.' I think I drew it this way because the appendix on my cadaver last semester looked like this. It was coming off from the posterior aspect of the cecum and only the most distal part was visible from the anterior view. I knew appendices were variable, but I think maybe I chose a variation that was not common enough to warrant being shown in an illustration (variations of a lot of anatomical features exist, but usually you only show the most common variant in drawings, unless the drawing is specifically focused on the variation itself). The cecum was also not quite right. The descending colon was too thin; Grey's informed me that the descending colon is supposed to be smaller than the ascending colon, but I think I got a little too carried away. And the sigmoid colon is absolutely incorrect. Yikes! Time to revise:

All of these images were done on tracing paper, so it's easy to layer over them and draw on top of your other drawings. This sheet of paper is just what I laid over the previous sketch to re-draw some of the big problem areas that had been brought to my attention in critique. I spent perhaps 2 hours drawing and re-drawing that cecum. It just didn't want to do what it was supposed to! It was terribly frustrating until I took a deep breath and just tried to casually, loosely sketch it in. Finally, it seemed to take shape. I think all my pencil-clenching was making the whole process harder than it needed to be.

I also realized I hadn't included the ileum, which was kind of silly since I totally meant to include that (you can see I sketched it in my first draft). So here I added it and tried to give it a nice, organic shape. It will fade out similar to how the rectum does.

Finally, I traced over the sketch and the revisions to come up with this final sketch. I wasn't as heavy-handed with the line weight this time because I think I know what I want to do once I bring this into Illustrator. I did start playing around with the line direction on the cecum in an attempt to re-create some of the tone I'd been working with in line.

I brought this image to my professor for another critique and he said there were many improvements. However, the ileum needs to be widened (I'm looking at it now and I have no idea why I made it so small!) and the appendix still needs some help with placement, but those are easily editable once I begin the digital part of this process. Funnily enough, he liked the linework on my previous sketch better than the lines I did on this one. I am starting to think I work better when I'm more relaxed in the process.

I look forward to the final line drawing!

[thesmellofscience]

And my two last projects of the semester are finally in! Take a look:

Both for totally unrelated classes, but both I am equally proud of. The top image is a life cycle diagram. I painted it in photoshop, which is probably my favorite way of working. I love painting digitally, so it was nice going back to my roots to do something pretty.

As for the second image, it was a huge struggle. You might remember my post with the giant piece of paper covered in notes, right? Well, this is the final result. And judging by my critique yesterday, I actually pulled off what I thought would be impossible. So that, in and of itself, it a little victory.

I think you can all see now that I've settled upon a signature. Finally. Unless I need to change it for some reason, I think that's what I'm going to stick with. It's taken me 23 years to come up with something I like well enough, so...let's hope it works out!

Stay tuned for one last post with a link to my personal website.

[thesmellofscience]

This Is What Complexity Looks Like

The very, very, very beginning stages of another project I'm working on. This one includes relatively in-depth (at least for me) knowledge of molecular biology and how particular drugs work. Aspirin and Ibuprofen!

These concepts are particularly difficult for me to grasp. I knew that from the beginning because I've never been good with molecular structures and cell biology. So out of all the projects this semester, this one is going to be the most difficult for me. It definitely meant I had to change the way I approached the project, and the result is the page pictured above. Which, by the way, isn't an 8x11 piece of paper. It's 17x14 hefty square inches of something I like to call 'knowledge vomit.' In order to integrate all the information that I'm going to be working with, I have to be able to see it all at once. So I had to take notes while I read my journal articles (several of them!), do sketches, and wrap my head around my next project all on one piece of paper. It's rare I get to visualize my thought process like this, but I guess this is how I think and organize things! Not very organized, though. Lots of arrows and chicken scratch. Again, 'knowledge vomit' doesn't have to be pretty to be effective.

Now that I've done all that, I think I understand it pretty well and can go ahead and get started on the actual illustrations.

[thesmellofscience]

Revised Narrative Project

So after being given critique about the layout and some of the choices I made for the project about cleaning dog ears, I made some revisions. I definitely altered some color choices and some of the layout. I also had to fix some spelling mistakes (oops! That's always embarrassing).

Overall, I'm happy with some of the improvements I've made. I'm just a little disappointed that the layout ended up viewing less in a circular pattern and kind of got more crunched. The large laying down dog used to be in the center with everything around it and now it's kind of shuffled off to the side, which is perhaps the one big down-side I see to this new layout.

I wish I had time to do revisions on all of my work! Perhaps that is a project I'll commit myself to over Christmas break if I don't die during finals week.

[thesmellofscience]

Here are my final two versions of my fourth project. We had the challenge of placing organs in their anatomically correct positions relative to an anatomically correct skeleton and body. This was definitely challenging, but overall I had a lot of fun. Because I was able to play around in photoshop with these images, I definitely enjoyed the process more than if I had done the majority in pencil.

The critique went well. I got compliments on my form and lines, but I did not manage to go without error. The ureters should appear to be going into the bladder (note: drawn as a relatively full bladder because it is coming up over the pubic symphysis and this was intentional) from the posterior side. I didn't draw them that way--it honestly didn't really occur to me! I think I spent so much time on the kidney placement I didn't consider my ureters as well as I should have. Also, the large intestine should be coming out a little further on the right side to sit a little closer to the iliac fossa.

Other than that, it seemed like this was a successful project!